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THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



THE 



NEMESIS OF FAITH 



BY 

A. FROUDE, M.A., 

THE ENGLISH HISTORIAN. 



** Kai /xrjr Epyop y* ovk en jtivQcp 
XSoor dsdaXEvrat' 
. . . . duipra d^ dve/j-ODr 
IIvE'L/.iara TtdvrcDv, eh aXXrjXa 
'2rd6iy avTinrovv aTtodeiKrv/ueva.'" 

Prometheus. 



D. M. BENNETT, 

LIBERAL AND SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING HOUSE, 

141 Eighth Street, New York. 



MDCCCLXXIX. 



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486555 

AUG 21 1942 



THE 

NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



LETTER I. 



Huntley Parsonage, September 4, 18 — . 

I PROMISED so long ago to write to you, dear Arthur, 
that by this time, if you have not already forgotten me, 
you will at least have begun to think it desirable to forget 
me as soon as possible, for an ungrateful, good-for-nothing 
fellow ; but I am going to be very just, and pay heavy in- 
terest — and I think*letter debts are like all other debts. 
If you pay them when they are due, they are taken as a 
matter of course, and without gratitude ; but lep.ve them 
till your poor creditor leaves off expecting, and then they 
fall in like a godsend. So I hope you are already delighted 
at the sight of my handwriting, and when you get to the 
end of these long sheets, which I am intending to fill to j^ou, 
I shall be quite back again in my old favor. Perhaps, 
though, I am too sanguine ; I have nothing but myself to 
write about,no facts,no theories,no opinions,no adventures, 



6 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

no sentiments, nothing but my own poor barren individ- 
ualism, of considerable interest to me, but I do not know 
why I should presume it will be so to you. Egotism is 
not tiresome, or it ought not to be, if one is sincere about 
oneself ; but it is so hard to be sincere Well, never mind, 
I mean to be, and you know me well enough to see 
through me when I am humbugging. A year has gone 
since we parted ; T have had nothing all this time to tell 
you, except that I was unsettled and uncomfortable, and 
why should I trouble you with that ? Now, you will see I 
want your help, so now I come to you. It is not that I have 
had any positive grievance, but I seem to have had hold 
of every thing by the wrong side. My father is very an- 
xious to see me settled into some profession or other, and 
here have the three black graces alterna.tely been present- 
ing their charms to me, and I can't get the apple deliver- 
ed ; I turn from one to the other, and the last I look at 
seems always the ugliest, always has some disagreeable 
feature I cannot reconcile myself with. I cannot tell 
why it is, Arthur, but I scarcely know a professional man 
I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the 
world calls successful, that I should the least wish to re- 
semble. The roads they have to trav^el are beaten in by 
the unscupulous as well as the scrupulous ; they are none 
of the cleanest, and the race is too fast to give one time 
to pick one's way. I know men try to keep their private 
conscience distinct from their professional conscience, but 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 7 

it does not always do. Their nature, like the dyer's hand, 
is subdued to what it works in ; and you know a lawyer 
when you see him, or a doctor, or a professional clergy- 
man. They are not simply men, but men of a particular 
sort, and, unfortunately, something not more but less than 
men — men who have sacrificed their own selves to be- 
come the paid instruments of a system. There may be 
exceptions where there is very great genius ; but I am not 
a genius, and I cannot trust myself to hope I should be 
an exception, and so I go round and round, and always 
end where I began, in difficulties. I believe you know 
something of my father — a more upright, excellent man 
never breathed ; and though not very clever, yet he has a 
breadth of solid understanding which, for such creatures 
as we men are, is far better furniture to be sent into the 
world with than any cleverness ; and I am sure there 
must be something wrong in my fastidiousness when he 
so highly disapproves of it. He was contented to laugh 
at me, you know, as long as I was at college, because my 
dreaming, as he called it, did not interfere with my suc- 
ceeding there ; but it is quite another thing now, and he 
urges me again and again, almost with a severity of re- 
proof which is bitterly distressing to me. I have shown 
talents, he says, of which it is my duty to make use ; the 
common sense of mankind has marked out the best ways 
to use them, and it is worse than ridiculous in a young 
man such as I am to set myself up to be different from 



8 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

everybody else, and to be too good to do what many of 
the best and wisest men he knows, are doing. My bro- 
thers were all getting on honorably and steadily, and why 
was not I ? It was true, he allowed, that unscrupulous 
men did sometimes succeed pi-ofessionally, but it was n@t 
•by their faults, but by their virtues, by activity and pru- 
dence, and manly self-restraint He added 

something which made a deeper impression upon me than 
this ; for all this I had said often and often to myself. I 
had told him that as I had a small independence, I thought 
I might wait at least a year or two, and give myself time 
to understand my own wishes clearly before I committed 
myself. " You say you wish to be a man, Markham," he 
answered, '' and not a professional man. I do not propose 
to control you. At your age, and with your talents, you 
must learn what life is now, not from me, but from life 
itself; but if you v/ill hear an old man's opinion, I will 
give it you. If you think you can temper yourself into 
manliness by sitting here over your books, supposing you 
will grow into it as a matter of course, by a rule of ne- 
cessity, in the same way as your body grows old, it is the 
"very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man into 
his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character ; 
you must hammer and forge yourself one. Go out into 
life, you will find your chance there, and only there. You 
ask to wait. It is like a timid boy waiting on the river 
bank to take his plunge. The longer he stands shivering 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 9 

the harder he finds it. At the year's end you will see 
more difficulties than you see now, because you yourself 
will have grown feebler. Wait one more, and then you 
will most likely go on to the end, into your second child- 
hood of helplesness." 

What shall I do, Arthur ? It is so true, every word of 
this. I feel it is. I know it is ; and it is shameful, in- 
deed, to rust into nothingness. Yet what to do ! Surely 
it were kinder far to train us out from our cradles into a 
course which should be chosen for us, and make us begin 
our crawling on the road we are to travel, with spelling- 
books of law and physic, and nursery courts of justice, or 
diseased dolls to lecture or to doctor. All would be so 
easy then ; we should form each about our proper centre, 
and revolve calmly and surely in the orbit into which we 
were projected. It is a frightful business to bring us up 
to be only men, and then bid us choose for ourselves one 
of three roads which are to take us down again. For they 
do take us down. Unless we are in Fortune's best books, 
and among those same lucky sons of genius, for law or 
physic, we must learn a very dirty lesson, and train our 
lips into very smooth chicanery, or it is slow enough her 
wheel will move with us. Speak the truth, and the truth 
only, and in the first you are a fool, and in the second you 
are a brute. " Ah, well, but at least the Church is open 
to you," you will say, and that is what my father says. 
There the most fastidious person will find the purest 



10 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Course he could mark down for himself fall infinitely 
short of what is required of him. And you believe I al- 
ways intended to be a clergyman ; yes, and it is true. I 
always did intend it ; and if you could tell the envy with 
which I watch my friends passing in within the precincts 
of its order into what ought to be the holiest and happiest 
of lives ; alas ! here too I seem to be barred out, and one of 
my worst sorrows is that I cannot tell my father why I 
am. I will tell you, Arthur, but not now. I must think 
well over what I am to write on that subject, and you 
shall have another letter about it. But, oh, what a happy 
life that is ! I cannot understand why, as a body, clergy- 
men are so fatally uninteresting ; they who through 
all their waking hours ought to have for their one 
thought the deepest and most absorbing interests of hu- 
manity. It is the curse of making it a profession — a road 
to get on upon, to succeed in life upon. The base stain 
is apparent in their very language, too sad an index of 
what they are. Their "duty,'' what is it? — to patter 
through the two Sunday services. For a little money one 
of them will undertake the other's duty for him. And 
what do they all aim at ? — getting livings ! not cures of 
souls, but livings; something which will keep their 
wretched bodies living in the comforts they have found 
indispensable. What business have they, any one of 
them, with a thought of what becomes of their poor 
wretched selves at all ? To hear them preaching, to hear 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 11 

the words they use in these same duties of theirs, one 
would suppose they really believed that getting on, and 
getting rich, and getting comfortable, were quite the last 
things a Christian should propose to himself. They cer- 
tainly say so. Alas ! with the mass of them, the pulpit 
keeps its old meaning, and is but a stage. Off the stage 
there is the old prate of the old world stories, the patron- 
age of this rich man and that, the vacant benefice or ca- 
thedral stall. So and so, lucky fellow, has married a bis- 
hop's daughter, and the bishop himself has the best 
dressed wife and the best equipage in London ; and, oh, 
bitterest satire of all ! the very pulpit eloquence with 
which they can paint the better life, the beauty of Christ- 
ianity, is valued only but as a means of advancing them 
into what they condemn. Yet this need not be, and this 
is not what I shrink from. The Church is an ill-paid 
profession, and so of the men who make a profession the 
main thing in this life of ours, it must be contented with 
the refuse of the educated. Not more than one in fifty 
takes orders who has a chance in any other line ; but 
there is this one in each fifty, and so noble some of these 
units are, that they are not only enough for the salt of 
their class, but for the salt of the world too. Men who 
do indeed spend their lives among the poor and the suffer- 
ing, who go down and are content to make a home in 
those rivers of wretchedness that run below the surface 
of this modern society, asking nothing but to shed their 



12 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

lives, to pour one drop of sweetness into that bitter stream 
of injustice : oh, Arthur, what men they are ! what a 
duty that might be ! I think if it is true what they say 
who profit by this modern system ; if there is indeed no 
help for it, and an ever increasing multitude of miserable 
beings must drag on their wretched years in toil and suf- 
fering that a few may be idle and enjoy ; if there be no 
hope for them ; if to-morrow must be as to-day, and they 
are to live but to labor, and when their strength is spent, 
are but to languish out an unpensioned old age on a pub- 
lic charity which degrades what it sustains ; if this be 
indeed the lot which, by an irrevocable decree, it has 
pleased Providence to stamp upon the huge majority of 
mankind, incomparably the highest privilege which could 
be given to any one of us is to be allowed to sacrifice 
himself to them, to teach them to hope for a more just 
hereafter, and to make the present more endurable by 
raising their minds to endure it. I have but one comfort 
in thinking of the poor, and that is, that we get somehow 
adjusted to the condition in which we grow up, and we 
do not miss the absence of what we have never enjoyed. 
They do not wear out faster, at least not much faster, than 
the better favored ; that is, if you may reckon up life by 
years, and if such as we leave them may be called life. 
Oh what a clergyman might do ! To have them all for 
an hour at least each week collected to be taught by him, 
really wishing to listen, if he will but take the trouble to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 13 

understand them, and to learn what they require to be 
told. How sick one is of all sermons such as they are ! 
Why will men go on thrashing ov^er and again the old 
withered straw that was thrashed out centuries ago, when 
every field is waving with fresh, quite other, crops 
craving for their hand ? Is it indolence or folly ? What 
is it ? I could linger on for hours over an employment I 
so much long for. It seems to be mine, as I dwell upon 
it; so entirely it is all I crave for; I have not talent 
enough to create fresh thought for strong cultivated men • 
but it has always been my delight to translate downwards 
what others have created ; and I have been so much about 
among the poor, and with all their faults and all their 
ignorance, I love their simple hearty ways so much that I 
could say with all my heart I felt myself called, as the 
Prayer Book says, to be their teacher ; and yet, and yet 
, • . . well, good bye, and bear with me. 

Your affectionate 

M. SUTHERLAND. 



14 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



LETTER II. 

September 6. 
" "TT THAT possible reason can I have for not taking 
T T orders ? " you may well ask. I promised to 
tell you, and I will ; yet I know not what you will think 
of me when I have done so Wherever as yet I have even 
dared to hint my feelings, I have been met by looks so 
cold and withering that I tremble at exposing them even 
to you. 0, Arthur, do not — do not make my trial harder 
. — do not you leave me too — do not make me lose my 
oldest, my only friend. Do not be frightened, I have com- 
mitted no crime, at least nothing which I can conceive to be 
a crime ; and yet they say it is one. Arthur, before I can 
be made a clergyman, I must declare that I unfeignedly 
believe all " the canonical writings of the Old Testa- 
ment ; " and I cannot. What does it mean — unfeignedly 
believe it all ? That all the actions related there are good, 
and all the opinions true ? Not that, of course ; because 
then all that Job's friends said would be as true as what 
Elihu said, and Lot's actions as good as Abraham's. But, 
I suppose, we are to believe that all those books were 
written by men immediately inspired by God to write 
them, because He thought them good for the education of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 15 

mankind ; that whatever is told in those books as a fact 
is a real fact, and that the Psalms and Prophecies were 
composed under the dictation of the Holy Spirit. Now I 
am not going to weary you with all the scientific difficul- 
ties and critical difficulties, and, worse than all, metaphy- 
sical difficulties, which have worn the subject so threadbare ; 
though I think but badly of this poor modern sophistry 
of ours, which stumbles on between its two opinions, and 
when it is hunted to its death, runs its head into the sand 
and will not see what it does not like to see. If there 
were no difficulties but these, and only my reason were 
perplexed, I could easily school my reason ; I could tell 
myself that God accommodated His revelations to the 
existing condition of mankind, and wrote in their lan- 
guage. But, Arthur, bear with me, and at least hear me ; 
though my head may deceive me, my heart cannot. I 
will not, I must not, believe that the all-just, all-merciful, 
all-good God can be such a Being as I find him there 
described. He ! He ! to have created mankind liable to 
fall — to fall — to have laid them in the way of a temptation 
under which he knew they would fall, and then curse 
them and all who were to come of them, and all the world 
for their sakes ; jealous, passionate, capricious, revengeful, 
punishing children for their fathers' sins, tempting men, 
or at least permitting them to be tempted into blindness 
and folly, and then destroying them. O, Arthur, Arthur ! 
this is not a Being to whom I could teach poor man to 



16 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

look up to out of his sufferings in love and hope. What ! 
that with no motive but His own will He chose out 
arbitrarily, for no merit of their own, as an eastern despot 
chooses his favorites, one small section of mankind^ 
leaving all the world besides to devil-worship and lies ; 
that the pure, truth-loving Persian of the mountains, who 
morning and night poured out his simple prayer to the 
Universal Father for the good of all His children ; that 
the noble Greeks of Marathon and Thermopylae, the 
austere and stately Romans, that then these were out- 
casts, aliens, devil-worshippers; and that one strange 
people of fanatics so hideously cruel that even women 
and children fell in slaughtered heaps before their indis- 
criminating swords, that these alone were the true 
God's true servants ; that God bid them do these things, 
and, exulting in their successful vengeance as a vindica- 
tion of His honor, compelled the spheres out of their 
courses to stand still and assist the murdering ! . . . 
And why all this murdering ? Sometimes for sins com- 
mitted five centuries past ; while, for those five centuries, 
generation was let go on to follow generation in a dark- 
ness out of which no deliverance was oflfered them ; for 
Israel monopolized God. It is nothing to say these were 
exceptive peculiar cases. The nation to whom they were 
given never thought them peculiar cases. And what is 
Revelation if it is but a catalogue of examples, not which 
we are, but which we are not to follow ? No, Arthur 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 17 

this is not God. This is a fiend. Oh, surely this is not 
the faith of men who worshipped the Father of mankind, 
but rather of the followers of a god who was but one of 
many, a god among gods — the God of Israel, as Baal was 
the god of the nations ; and I cannot think the disputes 
and jealousies of heaven are tried and settled by the 
swords of earth. No ! If I may believe that the Jews 
were men like the rest, and distinguished from the rest not 
by any difference in kind in the nature of their relations 
with Heaven, but by their own extraordinary character ; 
that, more than any set of men who ever lived, they 
realized the life and active energy of God upon earth — 
that tk^ey believed they were the favorites of Heaven — - 
and that, in spite of the savage fanaticism into which it 
sometimes plunged them, their faith did in a way make 
them what they professed to be, and produced fruits of a 
most wonderful kind — all is easy to me then. Winning 
Canaan by strength, it was natural they, or at least their 
children, should think that God had given it them ; and 
in those fierce and lawless times many dreadful things 
might be done, which at least we can understand and 
allow for, though in sorrow. But that the unchanging 
God should have directly prompted, should have interfered 
to assist in what humanity shudders at while it reads — 
oh, I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before 
a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my 

heart forbids me to reverence. It runs through the whole 
B 



18 THENEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Old Testament this feeling, but with a few great excep- 
tions, and it is little use to make particulars. David may 
have been the man after God's heart if the Israelites were 
His peculiar people ; and the furious zealots in the last 
desperate wars in Palestine were the same people as their 
fathers who slaughtered Amalek. David himself is the > 
great type of the race in his savageness and in his piety ! 
Who could believe that the same man who wrote the De 
profundis Domini could have craved to wash his foot- 
steps in his enemy's blood ? The war of good and evil 
is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest 
time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest 
creed. Bear with me, Arthur, we read the Bible with 
very different eyes. For myself, the most delightful trait 
in the entire long history is that golden thread of humanity 
which winds along below the cruelty of the exclusive 
theory, and here and there appears in protest, in touches 
of deeper sympathy for its victims, than are ever found 
for the more highly-favored. Who are those who most 
call out our tears ? Is it not the outcast mother setting 
down her child that she may not see it die, the injured 
Esau, the fallen Saul, Aiah's daughter watching by her 
murdered children, or that unhappy husband who followed 
his wife weeping all along the road as David's minions 
were dragging her to his harem ? 

If the Church is a profession, I know all this is very 
weak and very foolish ; one might enter it then, accept- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 19 

ing what it insists upon, in the same way as the lawyer 
takes the laws as he finds them, not perhaps as he would 
have them if he had to choose, but as facts existing which 
it is not his place to quarrel with. And many sensible 
people do accept the Bible in this way, they take it as it 
stands ; they are not responsible, and they are contented 
to draw reasonable doctrines from it, gliding over what is 
inconvenient. I know, too, there are some excellent, oh, 
most excellent people, deep and. serious people, who do 
not find the difficulties there at all which I find, and ac- 
cept it all with awe and fear, perhaps, but still with a real 
serious conviction that it is all true. Perhaps it is. And 
then I ... I ... am .. . am. 

And then there is another thing, Arthur, which seems 
to be taught, not in the Old Testament but in the New, 
whicJi I should have to say I believed ; a doctrine this, 
not a history, and a doctrine so horrible that it could only 
have taken root in mankind when they were struggling 
in the perplexities of Manicheeism, and believed that the 
Devil held a divided empire with God. I mean that the 
largest portion of mankind, these very people who live 
about us, feel with us, act with us, are our daily compan- 
ions — the people we meet at dinner or see in the streets, 
that are linked in with us with innumerable ties of com- 
mon interests, common sympathies, common occupations 
—these very people are to be tortured for ever and ever 
in unspeakable agonies. My God ! and for what ? They 



20 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

are thrown out into life, into an atmosphere impregnated 
with temptation, with characters unformed, with imper- 
fect natures out of which to form them, under necessity 
of a thousand false steps, and yet with every one scored 
down for vengeance ; and laying up for themselves a re- 
tribution so infinitely dreadful that our whole soul shrinks 
horror-struck before the very imagination of it ; and this 
under the decree of an all-just, all-bountiful God — the 
God of love and mercy. • 0, Arthur ! when a crime of one 
of our fallen brothers comes before ourselves to judge, 
how unspeakably difficult we find it to measure the bal- 
ance of the &in ; cause winding out of cause, temptation 
out of temptation ; and the more closely we know the 
poor guilty one, the nature with which he was born, the 
circumstances which have developed it, how endlessly 
our difficulty grows upon us ! — how more and more it 
seems to have been inevitable, to deserve (if we may use 
the word deserve) not anger and punishment, but tears 
and pity and forgiveness. And for God who knows all ! 
who not only knows all but who determined all — who 
dealt us out our natures and placed us as it pleased Him ! 
" what more could have been done to my vineyard that I 
have not done ? " Alas ! then, if Omnipotence could not 
bring but wild grapes there why was the poor vineyard 
planted ? It never asked to be. Why fling it out here 
into these few miserable years ; when it cannot choose 
but fall to ruin, and then must be thrown into hell-fire 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 21 

for ever ?....! cannot tell. It may be from 
some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange dis- 
ease ; but for me, and I should think too for every human 
being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know 
that one single creature is in that dreadful place would 
make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in 
heaven, for they love there. Justice ! v/hat justice ! I be- 
lieve that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever, for only 
good can live, and good has not been theirs ; but how 
durst men forge our Saviour's words ^' eternal death " into 
so horrible a meaning ? And even if he did use other 
v/ords, and seem to countenance such a meaning for them 
(and what witness have we that He did, except that of 
men whose ignorance or prejudice might well have inter- 
preted these words wrongly as they did so many others ?) 
. . . . But I am on dangerous ground ; only it seems 
to me that it would be as reasonable to build a doctrine 
on every poet's metaphor, or lecture on the organic struc- 
ture of the Almighty because it is said the scent of Noah's 
sacrifice pleased Him, as to build theories of the everlast- 
ing destiny of mankind on a single vehement expression 
of one whose entire language was a figure. 

I know but one man, of iliore than miserable intellect, 
who in these modern times has dared defend eternal pun- 
ishment on the score of justice, and that is Leibnitz ; a 
man who, if I know him rightly, chose the subject from 
its difficulty as an opportunity for the display of his gQn- 



22 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

ius, and cared so little for the truth that his conclusions 
did not cost his heart a pang or wring a single tear from 
him. And what does Leibnitz say ? That sin, forsooth, 
though itself be only finite, yet, because it is against an 
Infinite Being, contracts a character of infinity, and so 
must be infinitely punished. It is odd that the clever 
Leibnitz should not have seen that a finite punishment, 
inflicted by the same Infinite Being, would itself of course 
contract the same character of infinity. But what trifling 
all this is Arthur ! The heart spurns metaphysics, and 
one good honest feeling tears their shrivelled spider 
webs to atoms. No, if I am to be a minister of religion, 
T must teach the poor people that they have a Father in 
heaven, not a tyrant ; one who loves them all beyond 
power of heart to conceive ; who is sorry when they do 
wrong, not angry ; whom they are to love and dread, not 
with caitiflT coward fear, but with deepest awe and rever- 
ence, as the all-pure, all-good, all-holy. I could never fear 
a God who kept a hell prison-house. No, not though he 
flung me there because I refused. There is a power 
stronger than such a one ; and it is possible to walk un- 
scathed even in the burning furnace. What ! am I to tell 
these poor millions of sufferers, who struggle on their 
wretched lives of want and misery, starved into sin, mad- 
dened into passion by the fiends of hunger and privation, 
in ignorance because they were never taught, and with 
but enough of knowledge to feel the deep injustice under 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 23 

which they are pining ; am I to tell them, I say, that 
there is no hope for them here, and less than none here- 
after ; that the grave is but a precipice off which all, all of 
them, save here one and there one, will fall down into an- 
other life, to which the worst of earth is heaven ? '' Why, 
why/' they may lift up their torn hands and cry in bitter 
anger, " why, Almighty One, were we ever born at all, if 
it was but for this ?" Nay, I suppose the happiest, the 
most highly favored, of mankind looking back over a 
long unchequered life, where all the best and highest 
which earth has to give her children has been scatter- 
ered at their feet, looking back and telling over their 
days, might count upon their fingers the hours which 
they had lived, which were worth the pains it cost their 
mother to bear them. And all for this ! No, Arthur, no ! 
I never can teach this ; I would not so dishonor God as 
to lend my voice to perpetuate all the mad and foolish 
things which men have dared to say of Him. I believe that 
we may find in the Bible the highest and purest religion 

most of all in the history of Him in whose 

name we all are called. His religion — not the Christian 
religion, but the religion of Christ — the poor man's gos- 
pel ; the message of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of love ; 
and, oh, how gladly would I spend my life, in season and 
out of season, in preaching this ! But I must have no hell 
terrors, none of these fear doctrines ; they were^not in the 
early creeds, God knows whether they were ever in the 



24 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

early gospels or ever passed His lips. He went down to 
hell, but it was to break the chains, not to bind them. 
Advise me — oh, advise me ! I cannot stand by myself — 
I am not strong enough, without the support of system 
and position, to work an independent way ; and my 
father and my friends too, it would be endless bitterness 
with them. Advise me ! No, you cannot advise me ! 
With what absurd childishness one goes on asking ad- 
vice of people, knowing all the while that only one's self 
can judge, and yet shrinking from the responsibility; only 
do not hate me, Arthur — do not write me cold stuffy let- 
ters about my state of mind. For Heaven s sake, if you 
love me, if you ever loved me, spare me that. Show me 
if I am wrong. It is easy to be mistaken. But do not 
tell me it is wicked of me to have thought all this, for it 
is not — I am certain it is not. 

M. S. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 25 



LETTER III. 

September 11. 

I DID not say half I wished to say, Arthur : ever since 
I wrote I have been thinking how confusedly and 
stupidly I expressed myself Somehow one never has 
one's thoughts in the right place when they are wanted, 
either for writing or for talking; and it is only after, 
when they can do no good, that the stupid helpless things 
comes poking up into one's mind. '' This is what I 
wanted ; this is what I ought to have said," you think ; 
you catch him, and he is a Proteus in your fingers, and 
you have only got a monster, half human and half beast. 
Ah, well, it is ill laughing with a heavy heart. I will try 
again. At any rate you will be clever enough to see what 
I mean. I suppose most people would allow they found 
some difficulties at any rate with the Old Testament, when 
I find insuperable ones, only they cannot feel them as I 
do. To believe, for instance, that God worked miracles 
to plague a nation for their ruler's sins, ought to make 
their lives intolerable. Perhaps if it all really is as they 
say, a certain apathy of heart is one af the rewards of 
their implicit faith to save them from its consequences. 
But why do they believe it at all ? They must say 



26 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

because it is in the Bible. Yes, here it is. Other books we 
may sit in judgment upon, but not upon the Bible. That 
is the exception, the one book which is wholly and en- 
tirely true. And we are to believe whatever is there, no 
matter how monstrous, on the authority of God. He has 
told us, and that is enough. But how do they know He 
has told us. The Church says so. Why does the Church 
say so ? Because the Jews said so. And how do we 
know the Jews could not be mistaken? Because they 
said they Avere God's people, and God guided them. One 
would have thought if this were so, He would have 
guided them in the interpreting their books too, and we 
ought to be all Jews now. But, in the name of Heaven, 
what is the history of those books which we call the Old 
Testament ? No one knows who the authors were of the 
greater part of them, or even at what date they were 
written. They make no claim to be inspired themselves ; 
at least only the prophets make such claim ; before the 
captivity there was no collection at all ; they had only 
the Book of the Law, as it is called, of which they took 
such bad care that what that was none of us now know. 
The Pentateuch has not the slightest pretensions to be 
what Moses read in the ears of all the people, and Joshua 
wrote upon twelve stones. There is no doubt at all that 
it was written, or at least compiled into its present form, 
long long after. All we can make out is, that in the later 
and fallen age of the Jews, when their imaginative great- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 27 

ness had forsaken them, when they were more than half 
Chaldaicized,and their high enthusiastic faith and passion- 
ate devotion to their God had dwindled down into intol- 
erant arrogance and barren fanaticism, wishing to console 
themselves for their present degradation by the glory of 
the past, they made a collection out of the wreck of the 
old literature. Digests, like the Books of Chronicles were 
compiled out of the fragments of the old Prophets ; the 
whole was then cast together in one great mould, where 
of course God was the founder; the number of books, 
sentences, words, syllables, letters, were all counted, and 
sealed with mystical meanings, and behold the one com- 
plete entire Divine Revelation of the Almighty, composed, 
compiled, and finished by Himself. Were ever such huge 
pretensions hung upon so slight a thread ? And the 
worst is, that by this tinsel veil we have hung before it, 
the real splendor of the Bible is so entirely hidden from 
us ; what with our arbitrary chapter readings cutting 
subjects into pieces, our commentaries and interpretations , 
built not on labored examination of what the people 
were for whom and by whom the books were written, but 
piled together hap-hazard out of polemic lucubrations as 
if they were all prophecies, and their meanings fixed by 
after history ; with the unfathomed dulness of our Ser- 
vice, in which the Venite Exulteraus is followed by the 
Miserere mei Domine in the same dull, stupid, soulless 
tone, as if it was a barrel organ that was playing them, 



28 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

and not a human voice speaking out of human heart. 
Oh, what are we doing but making a very idol of the 
Bible, treating it as if we supposed that to read out of it 
and in it had mechanical virtue, like spells and charms — 
that it worked not as thought upon thought, but by some 
juggling process of talismanic materialism. Oh, Heavens! 
how our hearts bleed with the poor mourners by the 
waters of Babylon ; how we exult with them, and share 
their happiness in the glorious hymns they poured out on 
their return, if we may believe that it was they them- 
selves whose souls were flowing out there in passionate 
simplicity. But how are we flung back upon ourselves 
perplexed, confused, and stupified, when we are told that 
all this is, as Coleridge calls it, but a kind of superhuman 
ventriloquism — that the voice and the hearts of the singers 
no more made this music than the sun-clock makes the 
hours which it marks upon the dial-plate ! And then all 
David's prayers in his banishment. What, were thej^ 
not prayers then ? Not his prayers as his broken spirit 
flung itself upon God, but model prayers which God was 
making for mankind, and using but David's lips to articu- 
late them into form ? Ah, well ? The Mahometans say 
their Koran was written by God. The Hindoos say the 
Vedas were ; we say the Bible was, and w^e are but inter- 
ested witnesses in deciding absolutely and exclusively 
for ourselves. If it be immeasurably the highest of the 
three, it is because it is not the most divine but the most 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 29 

human. It does not differ from them in kind ; and it 
seems to me that in ascribing it to God we are doing a 
double dishonor ; to ourselves for want of faith in our 
soul's strength, and to God in making Him responsible for 
our weakness. There is nothing in it but what men 
might have written; much, oh much, which it would drive 
me mad to think any but men, and most mistaken men, 
had written. Yet still as a whole, it is by far the noblest 
collection of sacred books in the world ; the outpouring 
of the mind of a people in whom a larger share of God's 
spirit was for many centuries working than in any other 
of mankind, or who at least most clearly caught and 
carried home to themselves the idea of the direct and 
immediate dependence of the world upon Him. It is so 
good that as men looked at it they said this is too good 
for man ; nothing but the inspiration of God could have 
given this. Likely enough men should say so ; but what 
might be admired as a metaphor, became petrified into a 
doctrine, and perhaps the world has never witnessed any 
more grotesque idol worship than what has resulted from 
it in modern Bibliolatry. And yet they say we are not 
Christians, we cannot be religious teachers, nay, we are 
without religion, we are infidels, unless we believe wdth 
them. We have not yet found the liberty with which 
Christ has made us free. Infidels, Arthur ! Ah, it is a 
hard word ! The only infidelity I know is to distrust 
God, to distrust his care of us, his love for us. And yet 



80 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

that word ! How words cling to us, and like an accursed 
spell force us to become what they say we have become. 
When I go to church, the old church of my old child days, 
when I hear the old familiar bells, with their warm sweet 
heart music, and the young and the old troop by along 
the road in their best Sunday dresses, old well-known 
faces, and young unknown ones, which by and by will 
grow to be so like them, when I hear the lessons, the old 
lessons, being read in the old way, and all the old associa- 
tions come floating back upon me, telling me what I too 
once was, before I ever doubted things were what I was 
taught they were ; oh, they sou5id so sad, so bitterly sad. 
The tears rise into my eyes ; the church seems full of 
voices, whispering round me. Infidel, Infidel, Apostate ; 
all those believing faces in their reverent attention glisten 
with reproaches, so calm, they look so dignified, so 
earnestly composed. I wish — I wish I had never been 
born. Things grow worse and worse at home. Little 
things I have let fall are turned against me. The tem- 
perature is getting very cold, and our once warm and 
happy family, where every feeling used to flow so sweetly 
together in one common stream, seems freezing up, at 
least wherever I am, into disunited ice crystals. Arthur, 
Arthur, the sick heart often wants a warm climate as wejl 
as the sick body. They talk in whispers before me. Reli- 
gious subjects are pointedly avoided. If I say anything 
myself, I am chilled with frosty monosyllables, and to no 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 31 

one soul around me can I utter out a single thought. 
What ! Do they fancy it is any such wonderful self- 
indulgence, this being compelled to doubt what they stay 
trusting in ? That it is a license for some strange sin ? 
No, no, no. And yet they are right too — yes, it is very 
good, and very right. They are only following the old 
lesson, which I followed too once, that belief comes of 
obedience ; and that it is only for disobedience that it is 
taken from us. My father says before them, that I am 
indolent and selfish ; and the rest seems all of a piece 

and a part of the same thing Yet God is 

my witness, nothing which I ever believed has parted 
from me, but it has been torn up by the roots bleeding 
out of my heart. Oh ! that tree of knowledge, that 
death in life. Why, why are we compelled to know^ any- 
thing, when each step gained in knowledge is but one 
more nerve summoned out into consciousness of pain ? 
Better, far better, if what is happier is better, to live on 
from day to day, from year to year, caring only to supply 
the wants each moment feels, leaving earth to care for 
earth, and the present for the present, and never seeking 
to disentomb the past, or draw the curtain of the future. 
Suppose I was to write a book, Arthur, and say I was in- 
spired to write it — like Emmanuel Swedenborg — a mad- 
house would be the best place for me, because common 
sense would at once pass sentence on the pretension, and 
if it did not, the poor book would be its own sentence. 



32 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

But no one dreams that there is anything improbable in 
the Jewish writers having been inspired ; and they will 
not let us try the books by their contents. No, it is 
written, they say, and so we must believe. Was there 
ever such a jumble of arguments ? The Bible is its own 
evidence, because it is so pure and holy. This and that 
thing we find in parts of it seems neither pure nor holy; 
but because it is there, we must believe it — on some other 
evidence therefore — on what, then ? on the witness of the 
Church. The Church proves the Bible, and the Bible 
proves the Church — cloudy pillars rotating upon air — 
round and round the theory goes whirling like the sum- 
mer wind-gusts. It has been the sacred book by which 
for so many centuries sa many human souls have lived] 
and prayed, and died. So have the Vedas, so has the 
Koran, so has the Zenda Vesta. As many million souls 
day a,fter day have watched the sun rise for their morn- 
ing prayer, and followed its setting by committing them- 
selves to God's care for protection in the darkness from 
the powers of night, have lived humble, God-fearing lives, 
and gone to their graves with the same trust of a life 
beyond waiting all who have been faithful to those, 
books — as many or more perhaps, than the Christians — 
no, there is no monopoly of God's favor. The evidence 
of religion — ah, I know where the true evidence lies, hj 
the pleadings of my own heart against me. Why, why 
must it be that all these alien histories, these strange 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 33 

theories and doctrines, should be all sown in together in 
the child seed-bed with the pure grain of Christianity ? 
so that in after years it is impossible to root them out 
without tramxpling over rudely on the good. And we 
must do it. They may be harmless, growing there unre- 
cognized ; but known for what they are, their poison 
opens then, and they or we must die. Arthur, is it 
treason to the Power which has g^iven us our reason, and 
willed that we shall use it, if I say I would gladly give 
away all I am, and all I ever may become, all the years, 
every one of them which may be given me to live, but 
for one week of my old child's faith, to go back to calm 
and peace again, and then to die in hope. Oh for one 
look of the blue sky as it looked then when we called it 
Heaven ! The old black wood lies round the house as it 
lay then, but I have no fear now of its dark hollow, of 
the black glades under its trees. There are no fairies and 
no ghosts there any more ; only the church bells and the 
church music have anything of the old tones, and they are 
silent, too, except at rare, mournful, gusty intervals. 
Whatever after evidence we may find, if we are so happy 
as to find any, to strengthen our religious convictions, it 
is down in childhood their roots are struck, and it is on 
old association that they feed. Evidence can be nothing 
but a stay to prevent the growm tree from falling ; it can 
never make it grow or assist its powers of life. The old 
family prayers, which taught us to reverence prayer, how- 



34 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

ever little we understood its meaning ; the far dearer 
private prayers at our own bedside ; the dear friends for 
whom we prayed ; the still calm Sunday, with its best 
clothes and tiresome services, which we little thought 
were going so deep into oui' heart, when we thought them 
so long and tedious ; yes, it is among these so trifling 
seeming scenes, these, and a thousand more, that our 
faith has wound among our heartstrings ; and it is the 
thought of these scenes now which threatens me with 
madness as I call them up again. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. ^ 35 



LETTER IV. 

Sept. 13. 

I CAN do nothing but write to yon, dear Arthur. You 
must bear with me — I am sure you will ; it is so in- 
expressible a relief to me. My feelings have begun to flow 
to you, and it is unsafe to check an opening wound. I 
find little pleasure enough in being at home : all day in 
the beautiful autumn I wander about by myself, and 
listen to what my heart is saying to me : and then in the 
evening I creep back and hide myseK in my little room 
and write it all down for you. I wonder whether I am 
serious in wishing to die. I certainly am in wishing I 
had never been born ; and at least it seems to me that if 
I was told I was to go with this summer s leaves, it would 
do more to make me happy for the weeks they have o-ot 
to hang upon the trees, than any other news which could be 
brought to me. I love the autumn. I love to watch my 
days dropping off one by one before the steady bio win o- 
time. You and I, Arthur, are but twenty-four, and your 
life is just beginning and mine seems to be done. It is 
well for me that I was never very hopeful ; and the sweet- 
est moments I can have now are when I stray at evenino* 
alone along the shore and watch the sea-birds as they 



36 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

sweep away after the sun on their gilded gleaming wings, 
or when the swallows are gathering for their long flight 
to bright smiling lands one knows not where. Some 
hope there is in their parting beauty, even when they 
seem to leave us desolate ; and as the sweet planets come 
out above the purple twilight, they are opening glimpses 
into some other world to which peace has flown away, 
and I, perhaps, may follow. There is a village in the 
wood, two or three miles from here — there was an abbey 
there once. But there is nothing left of the abbey but 
its crumbling walls, and it serves only for a burying- 
ground and for sentimental picnic parties. I was there 
to-day ; I sat there a long time, I do not know how long 
— I was not conscious of the place. I was listening 
to what it was saying to me. I will write it down and 
look at it, and you shall look at it : an odd enough sub- 
ject for a Christian ruin to choose — it began to talk about 
paganism. '' Do you know what paganism means ? '' it 
said : Pagani, Pagans, the old country villages. In all 
history there is no more touching word than that one of 
Pagan. 

In the great cities where men gather in their crowds 
and the work of the world is done, and the fate of the 
world is determined, there it is that the ideas of succeed- 
ing eras breed and grow and gather form and power, and 
grave out the moulds for the stamp of after ages. There 
it was, in those old Roman times, that the new faith rose 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 37 

in its strength, with its churches, its lecture-rooms, its 
societies. It threw down the gorgeous temples, it burnt 
their carved cedar work, it defiled the altars and scattered 
the ashes to the winds. The statues were sanctified and 
made the images of saints, the augurs' colleges were 
rudely violated, and they who were still faithful were 
offered up as martyrs, or scattered as wanderers over the 
face of the earth, and the old gods were expelled from 
their old dominion — the divinity of nature before the 
divinity of man. . . . Change is strong, but habit is 
strong too ; and you cannot change the old for new, like 
a garment. Far out in the country, in the woods, in the 
villages, for a few more centuries, the deposed gods 
still found a refuge in the simple minds of simple men 
who were contented to walk in the ways of their fathers 
— to believe what they had believed, to pray where they 
had prayed. What was it to these, the pomp of the gor- 
geous worship, the hierarchy of saints, the proud cathe- 
dral, and the thoughts which shook mankind ? Did not 
the sky bend over them as of old in its calm beauty, the 
sun roll on in the same old path, and give them light and 
warmth and happy sunny hearts ? The star gods still 
watched them as they slept — why should they turn away ? 
why seek for newer guardians ? Year by year the earth 
put on her robes of leaves and sweetest flowers^ — the rich 
harvests waved over the corn fields, and the fruit trees 
and the vineyards travailed as of old ; winter and sun- 



38 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

mer, spring and autumn, rain and sunshine, day and night, 
moving on in their never-ending harmony of change. 
The gods of their fathers had given their fathers these 
good things ; had their power waxed slack ? Was not 
the powerful hand stretched out still? Pan, almighty 
Pan ! He had given, and he gave still. Who watched 
over the travail pangs of the poor ewes at the breeding 
time ? Pan, almighty Pan ! Who taught the happy shep- 
herd to carve his love notes in the invisible air, and fill 
the summer nights with softest, sweetest flute music ? 
Pan, almighty Pan ! Had the water-nymphs forsaken 
their grottoes where the fountains were flowing as of old ? 
Were the shadows of the deep woods less holy ? Did the 
enchanted nightingale speak less surely the tale of her 
sorrow ? As it was in the days of their fathers so it was 
in theirs — their fathers had gone down to the dust in the 
old ways, and so would they go down and join them. 
They sought no better ; alike in death as in their life, 
they would believe where they had believed, though the 
creed was but a crumbling ruin ; sacrifice where they had 
sacrificed ; hope as they hoped, and die with them too ! 
Who shall say that these poor peasants were not acting 
in the spirit we most venerate, most adore ; that theirs 
was not the true heart language which we cannot choose 
but love ? And what has been their reward ? They have 
sent down their name to be the by-word of all after ages ; 



THE NEMESIS OF FA.ITH. 39 

the worst reproach of the worst men — a name convertible 
with atheism and devil-worship. 

" And now look at me," the old ruin said ; " centuries 
have rolled away, the young conqueror is decrepit now ; 
dying, as the old faith died, in the scenes where that 
faith first died ; and lingering where it lingered. The 
same sad sweet scene is acting over once again. I was the 
college of the priests, and they are gone, and I am but a 
dead ruin where the dead bury their dead. The village 
church is outliving me for a few more generations ; there 
still ring, Sunday after Sunday, its old reverend bells, and 
there come still the simple peasants in their simple dresses 
— ^pastor and flock still with the old belief; there beneath 
its walls and ruins they still gather down into the dust, 
fathers and children sleeping there together, waiting for 
immortality ; wives and husbands resting side by side in 
fond hope that they shall wake and link again the love- 
chain which death has broken ; so simple, so reverend, so 
beautiful ! Yet is not that, too, all passing away, away 
beyond recall ? The old monks are dead. The hermit- 
saints and hallowed relics are dust and ashes now. The 
fairies dance no more around the charmed forest ring 
They are gone, gone even here. The creed still seems to 
stand ; but the creed is dead in the thoughts of mankind. 
Its roots are cut away, down where it alone can gather 
strength for life, and other forms are rising there ; and 
once again, and more and more, as day passes after day, 



40 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

the aged faith of aged centuries will be exiled as the old 
was to the simple inhabitants of these simple places. 
Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from 
breaking, learn this lesson — once for all, you must cease, 
in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or 
form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, 
and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like 
ourselves. To be born in pain and nursed in hardship, a 
bounding imaginative youth, a strong vigorous manhood, 
a decline which refuses to believe it is a decline, and still 
asserts its strength to be what it was, a decrepit old age, 
a hasty impatient heir, and a death-bed made beau- 
tiful by the abiding love of some few true-hearted 
friends ; such is the round of fate through nature, through 
the seasons, through the life of each of us, through the 
life of families, of states, of forms of government, of 
creeds. It was so, it is so, it ever shall be so. Life is 
change, to cease to change is to cease to live ; yet if 
you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old 
friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a 
faith." 

This is what the old ruin said to me, Arthur, Arthur, 
did the ruin speak true ? 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 41 



^ LETTER V. 

Sept. 20. 

THINGS grow worse and worse with me at home ; my 
brothers are all away, lucky fellows, happy and 
employed. Oh, how I envy them. Letters come home, 
such bright sunny letters. They are getting on so well, 
Henry has just got his epaulets, and his captain took the 
occasion of writing a most polite letter to my father about 
it. He said he promised to be one of the most excellent 
officers iu the service, and so much more than merely a 
sailor, nice fellow, that he is ; and his highest pleasure 
seems to be the pleasure he knows his success will give 
my father. Then for James and Frederick — you know 
they are both younger than I am, yet James is already a 
lunior partner in the house, and Frederick tells us he is 
intendinof to strike for Ava^fes, as all the hardest cases in 
his master's office are handed over to him ; they seem born 
to get on, and when they come here, it is such an entire 
happy, hearty holiday with them, riding, hunting, shoot- 
ing, balls and parties — they are the life of everything about 
us ; while poor I — I, who was once expected too to be a 
credit to myself, am doing nothing, and can do nothing. 
I cannot work, for there is nothing I can work upon, and 



42 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



yet I never have a holiday, my wretched thoughts cling 
about me like evil spirits. I have no taste for what is 
called amusement. I suppose I do not like hunting and 
shooting, but I say to myself that I think it wrong to 
make my pleasures out of helpless creatures' pain, and for 
party-going, one had better have a light heart to like par- 
ties, or to be liked by them. Books nauseate me. I seem 
to have learnt all that I can learn from books, or else to 
have lost the power of learning anything from them ; and 
of all these modern writers there is not one who will 
come boldly up and meet the question which lies the 
nearest, or ought to lie the nearest, to our hearts. Car- 
lyle ! Carlyle only raises questions he cannot answer, and 
seems best contented if he can make the rest of us as dis- 
contented as himself; and all the others, all^ that is, who 
have any power at all, fight beside religion, either as if it 
were not worth saving, or as if it had nothing to do with 
them. Every day five columns of the Times are full or 
advertisements of new books, most of them with enough 
of flashy cleverness to let us endure them through a sin- 
gle reading, but then there is an end of them. A really 
serious, open-minded, single-hearted man — there is not 
one in the whole fraternity ; and the impudent presump- 
tion of these reviewers, critics and all ; well, at any rate, 
I am flung utterly upon myself, on my own resources, 
sufficiently miserable ones. My sisters work hard in the 
parish, if not in the best way, yet with strong enough 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 43 

sense of their duty, and with no lack of industry ; they 
sometimes ask me to join them, but it is in the patronis- 
ing unpleasant sort of way which reflects upon my help- 
lessness, as if they partly pitied and partly despised me ; 
not that I should care for that ; but somehow everything 
they do is in the formal business style as if '' the poor " 
were a set of things with which something had to be 
done, instead of human beings with hearts to feel and 
sufferings to be felt for and souls to be reverenced ; 
— and so I wander about mostly my own way. I go a 
good deal among the poor too, but at a distance from 
here ; and there are many pleasant cottages where I am 
sure of a smile and plenty of affection from the children. 
This is all very helpless, I know it is ; but there is no 
mending it, it must be. I wait for guidance, and my soul 
must have it, if I give it time. 

M. S. 



44 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



LETTER VI. 

Oct. 10. 

WELL, Arthur, we are come to a crisis now. Here 
I am at the parting of the ways ; I look down 
one, and I see a bright flowery road, with friends and for- 
tune smiling, and a happy home, and the work I longed 
for, all which promise to make life delightful : down the 
other, and I see — oh, I will not look down the other ; if I 
do I shall never dare to choose it. Do you not think that 
sometimes when matters are at the worst with us, when 
we appear to have done all which we ourselves can do, 
yet all has been unavailing, and we have only shown we 
cannot — not we will not — help ourselves ; that often just 
then something comes, almost as if supernaturally, to set- 
tle for us, as if our guardian angel took pity on our per- 
plexities, and then at last obtained leave to help us ? And 
if it be so, then what only might be a coincidence becomes 
a call of Providence, a voice from heaven, a command. 
But I am running on as usual with my own feelings, and 
I have not told you what it is which has happen- 
ed — after all it is nothing so very great — the bishop has 
offered my father a living for me ; it was done in a most 
delicate way, and with a high incidental compliment paid 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 45 

to myself. My father, before he spoke to me, had at the 
first mention of it reminded the bishop that I was not yet 
in orders. The bishop said that in my case it did not 
matter, from the high character which I had borne at col- 
lege, and from the way I had distinguished myself there 
I had been spending my time, he had no doubt, to the 
very best advantage at home ; and he thought it was a 
good sign in any young man when he took a longer time 
for study and moral preparation, instead of rushing at 
once into his profession. It was odd to see how flattered 
my father was, and how immediately his own opinion of 
me began to alter when he saw great people disposed to 
make much of me. He was embarrassed, however, in 
telling this to me, and he evidently had more doubts 
how I should take the information than he had liked to 
tell the bishop. Both the ordinations could be managed 
within a short time of one another, so there was no es- 
cape that way. My face did not brighten, and my 
father's consequently fell — I saw he had set his heart 
upon it. I could not bring myself to mortify him with 
the peremptory no which my conscience flung upon my 
lips ; I said I would think about it and give him my an- 
swer in two days. In justice to him, as well as myself, I 
felt I could not act any more entirely on my own judg- 
ment ; 1 could not open myself to him, no matter why, I 

could not but the next day I rode over to 

to talk to the dean, my uncle. I made no mys 



46 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

tery of anything with him ; I told him exactly how it 
was with me, my o -v^n difficulties, and my embarrassment 
at home. It relieved me to see how little he was startled, 
and he was so kind that I could ill forgive myself for 
having so long shrunk from so warm a mediator. He 
said he was not at all surprised, not that he thought 
there was anything particularly wrong about myself 
which should have led me astray, but my case, he said 
was the case of almost all young men of talent before 
they passed from the school of books into that of life. Of 
course, revelation had a great many most perplexing dif- 
ficulties about it ; but then, he said, just as my father had 
said before, I must remember that the real discipline of 
the mind is action, not speculation ; and regular activity 
alone could keep soul and body from disease. To sit still 
and think was simply fatal ; a morbid sensitiveness crept 
over the feelings like the nervous tenderness of an un- 
healthy body, and unless I could rouse myself to exer- 
tion, there would be no end at all to the disorder of which 
I complained. It was odd he treated it simply as a 
disorder, like one of the bodily disorders we have once in 
our lives to go through, which a few weeks' parish rou- 
tine and practical acquaintance with mankind would dis- 
sipate as a matter of course. I felt I was sinking, but I 
made another effort : would it not be better, I asked, if I 
was to make a trial first, and take work as a layman 
under some sensible and experienced rector. He thought 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 47 

not ; it would be difficult to find a person with a mind 
which could influence mine, and it would not do to risk a 
failure. The really valuable lessons were the lessons we 
taught ourselves, and as this opportunity had offered, it 
would be wrong, he fancied, to reject it : my father's 
feelings ought to weigh with me. Then surely, I said, I 
ought to tell the bishop, at any rate, something of which 
I had told him ; but my uncle said no again. At present, 
at least, there was no occasion; of course it was all 
nothing, as my own good sense in a very short time must 
show me ; and though a person in high authority might 
know things privately without any inconvenience, yet a 
public or official communication would be an embarrass- 
ing challenge upon him to take a part, for which in 
reality he might be quite sure there was no necessity. Well 
I need not tell you what I felt — it was something like a 
sentence of death, and yet I had determined to abide by 
his opinion. It seemed at any rate as if the responsibil- 
ity was not mine, though in my heart I knew it was. I 
set my teeth and galloped home, and to carry my fate 
through, and give myself no time to quarrel with it, I 
went at once to my father and committed myself to an 
assent. The heartfelt pleasure I saw I was giving him 
went far to relieve my own heart ; at any rate the sacri- 
fice was not for nothing. Life is more than a theory, and 
love of truth butters no bread : old men who have had to 
struggle along their way, who know the endless bitter* 



48 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

ness, the grave moral deterioration which follow an empty 
exchequer, may well be pardoned for an over-wish to see 
their sons secured from it ; hunger, at least, is a reality, 
and when I am as old as he is, and have sons of mine to 
manage for, I shall be quite as anxious, I dare say, about 
the "provision.'' He was delighted, you may be sure he 
was ; *we seemed to forget that there had been any cool- 
ness or difference between us ; in a little while we were 
talking over my income, the condition the house was in, 
and the furniture he was going to provide for me : a good 
wife was to be a serious advantage to me, and even more 
ambitous prospects were already beginning to dawn over 
the horizon ; and now here I am dismissed to my own 
room and my own reflection. What have I done ? After 
all, only what many do under a lower temptation. 1 
have consented for the sake of others, while they do it 
only for their own ; and after all perhaps what my uncle 
says is true, and by and by I shall find it so ; and then 
one remembers the case of Synesius, who, when he was 
pressed to take a bishopric by the Alexandrian metropol- 
itan, declared he would not teach fables in church unless 
he might philosophise at home. But Synesius made his 
conditions and got them accepted ; while I .... . 
Arthur, I cannot cheat myself with sophistry : it is not 
too late; I ought not, I think I ought not. Oh, curses 
on this old helpless theological fanaticism which encum- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 49 

bers us with a clumsy panoply of books and doctrines 
before it will trust us with our duties. 

Surely the character of the teacher, his powers, and 
the culture he has given them, the heart that there is in 
him, is what should be looked for in a clergyman ; not 
the readiness of servility with which he will plod along 
under chains, and mutter through the Sunday ritual. I 
believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that He is, 
but because my heart tells me so ; and the same heart 
tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love 
Him and obey Him, and that we can only be happy when 
we each love our neighbor better than ourselves. This is 
what the clergyman's business is to teach ; when the 
Bible says the same, let him use the Bible language. 
But there are many other things, besides what are in the 
Bible, which he ought to learn if he would assist the 
people to do what he tells them to do, if he would really 
give them rest from that painful vacancy of mind which 
life spent in routine of never-ending work entails upon 
them ; he should study their work, and the natural laws 
that are working in it ; he should make another version 
of the Bible for them in what is for ever before their 
eyes, in the cornfield, in the meadow, in the workshop, 
at the weaver's loom, in the market-places and the ware- 
houses. Here, better far than in any books, God has 
written the tables of His commandments ; and here, 
where men's work lies, their teacher should show them 



50 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

how to read them. Let every flower have a second image 
to their eyes ; let him bring in for witness to the love of 
the great Creator, every bird, every beast, every poorest 
insect ; let the teeming earth tell of Him as in her un- 
wearied labor-pangs she fashions up the material elements 
into the great rolling flood of life which ebbs and flows 
around them. They might do something, these clergy, if 
they would go to work over this ground; laboring in 
good earnest they would be for the souls of mankind. 
But they will not do it, and I long to do it ; and yet, and 
yet, Arthur, my conscience shrinks from those melancholy 
articles. It seems to say I should not trifle with my 
own soul ; and the guilt, if guilt there be, in all the 
sorrow which may foUov/ on my exclusion, will rest not 
on me who shrink from them, but on those who compel 
submission to them as the price at which we are to be 
admitted. 

But if I decline this living, what is to become of me ? 
I shall finally offend those whose happiness I value far 
more than I do my own. I shall condemn myself to an 
inert and self-destroying helplessness. Educated as I have 
been, there is no profession, except that of an author, 
which would be tolerable to me; and to be an author, I fear, 
I fear I have too little talent. The men that write books, 
Carlyle says, are now the world's priests, the spiritual 
directors of mankind. No doubt they are; and it shows 
the folly and madness of trying still to enforce tests 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 51 

that you do but silence a man in the pulpit, to send his 
voice along the press into every corner of the land. God 
abolished tests for all purposes, except of mischief and 
vexation, when he gave mankind the Printing Press. 
What is the result of sustaining them, but that we aie 
all at the mercy now of any clever self-assumer ? and 
while our nominal teachers answer no end for us, except 
the hour's sleep on Sunday, the minds of all of us, from 
highest lords to enlightened operatives, are formed in 
reading-rooms, in lecture-rooms, at the bar of public 
houses, by all the shrewdest, and often most worthless, 
novel writers, or paper editors. Yet even this is better 
than nothing — better than that people should be left to 
their pulpit teachers, such as they are. Oh ! how I wish 
I could write. I try sometimes ; for I seem to feel 
myself overflowing with thoughts, and I cry out to be 
relieved of them. But it is so stiflT and miserable when 
I get anything done. What seemed so clear and liquid, 
comes out so thick, stupid, and frost-bitten, that I myself, 
who put the idea there, can hardly find it for shame, if I 
go look for it a few days after. Still, if there was a 
chance for me ! To be an author — to make my thoughts 
the law of other minds ! — to form a link, however hum- 
ble, a real living link, in the electric chain which con- 
ducts the light of the ages ! Oh ! how my heart burns 
at the very hope. How gladly T would bear all the cold- 
ness, the abuse, the insults, the poverty, all the ill things 



52 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

which the world ever pays as the wages of authors who 
do their duty, if I could feel that I was indeed doing my 
duty so — being of any service so. I should have no diffi- 
culty about this living then, Arthur. I should know my 
work, and I would set about it with all my soul. But to 
do nothing ; to sit with folded hands, and the rust eating 
into my heart ; or, because I cannot do the very best, to 
lie down and die of despair ! Oh ! yes ; this life of ours 
is like the deep sea- water, when with bold exertion we 
may swim securely on the surface, but to rest is to sink 
and drown. Tell me, Arthur, tell me, what I ought 
to do. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 53 



LETTER VII. 

Oct. 20. 

THANK you a thousand times, my dear, dear friend, 
for your most kind, most wise letter. I will 
try, as you tell me, to have done with these inane 
speculations. The world is a mystery ; and if the Bible 
be the account which God has been pleased to give us of 
it, we may well be content if we find no fewer difficulties 
in the Bible, as Butler says, than we find in the world. 
I am no better than the wise and admirable men who 
have found deepest rest and happiness there, and I think 
I can do what you say is the least I ought to do — 
subdue my doubts, if I cannot satisfy them, and try the 
system which wise men say can only be known in trying. 
I will taste and see, and perhaps God will be gracious to 
me. At any rate, believing, as I do, in Providence with 
all my heart, I cannot doubt that it has been the way in 
which God has chosen to have His people taught; and 
what am I, that I should dare to fancy that I know 
better now ? I will take it in submission ; and as I am 
to teach with authority, so I will endeavor to learn under 
authority. At any rate, there can be no doubt what one 
ought to teach. With the Bible for a text-book, there is 



54 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

no doubt what, in the main, is the drift of its teaching, 
whatever one may think of parts of it. The best which 
can be said to individuals to urge them to their duty, 
is in that book ; and we have our conscience, too, and 
the Bible of universal history, too ; and, more than all, 
experience — the experience of our own hearts — each of 
which falls in with the great Bible to the moulding of 
our minds. They do as a fact mould them ; they must 
do it ; and therefore it is God's will that they should ; 
so that between them all there is no lack of matter 
without breaking debated ground. Well, then, I will 
try ; and if I am wrong, if I am indeed sinning against 
light, I am at least led astray by no unworthy motive in 
wishing to do something for God's service, and to spare 
distress to those who are most dear to me. For the rest 
— for advancement in the world, for the favor and smiles 
of men, for comfort, and ease, and respectability, and 
position, and those other things for which so many men 
in these days sell their souls, God is my witness they 
have not weighed so much in the balance with me, as to 
put me on my guard against their influence. Oh, no ! It 
were easy to go without all these things ; far easier than 
to bear them. Oh ! what a frightful business is this 
modern society; the race for wealth — wealth, I am 
ashamed to write the word. Wealth means well-being, 
weal, the opposition of woe. And is that money ? or can 
money buy it ? We boast much of the purity of our 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 55 

faith, of the sins of idolatry among the Romanists, and 
we send missionaries to the poor unenlightened heathens, 
to bring them out of their darkness into our light, our 
glorious light ; but oh ! if you may measure the f earful- 
ness of an idol by the blood which stains its sacrifice, by 
the multitude of its victims, where in all the world, in 
the fetish of the poor negro, in the hideous car of Indian 
Juggernaut, can you find a monster whose worship is 
polluted by such enormity as this English one of money ! 
You must pardon me, my heart is bleeding. I have made 
a resolution which has cost me more than tears, and now 
it is my best relief to flow out to you at random. Yes, 
if God adapts His revelation to the capacities of mankind, 
and the fierceness of His rule over them to the depth of 
their abasement, then, indeed, there is a cry in heaven 
for something darker than the darkest discipline of the 
old idolaters. Riches ! I suppose, at the smallest aver- 
age, for the making of a single rich man, we make a 
thousand whose life-long is one flood-tide of misery. 
The charnel-houses of poverty are in the shadow of the 
palace ; and as one is splendid, so is the other dark, 
poisonous, degraded. How can a man grow rich, except 
on the spoils of others' labor ? His boasted prudence and 
economy, what is it but the most skilfully availing him- 
self of their necessities, most resolutely closing up his 
heart against their cries to him for help ? In the homes 
of the poor, Arthur, I have seen — oh ! I w^U not appal 



56 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

your ears with what I have seen — hunger, and vice, and 
brutal ignorance, and savage rage, in fierce consciousness 
of what they suffer. Poor wretches struggling home 
from their day of toil, to find their children waiting for 
them with a cry for food, when they had none to give, 
and the famished mothers in broken-hearted despair. 
Ah, Heaven ! and our beautiful account-books, so cleanly 
written, the polished persiflage of our white-gloved 
rulers, and the fair register of the nation's prosperity, 
what does it look like, up in heaven, in the angel's book, 
Arthur ? No, God has saved me, at least, from that bad 
service ; there is no danger of my falling down before 
that monster ; and the one lasting comfort which is left 
me now, is that I shall be able to pay back something of 
my long debt for my easy life, and use this money they 
tell me I shall have, to clean my hands against the long 
account. Well, I will not bore you anymore ; we cannot 
get on for ever with nothing but gloom and sulkiness, 
and I have bothered you enough. It is night and day 
(or it ought to be) with all of us, if we want to keep in 
health. To be sure, now and then there will come a 
North Pole winter, with its six months' frost and dark- 
ness and mock suns : but Nature is still fair, and pays 
them oflf with their six months of day. I have had my 
share of the shadow, so I hope I am not going to be 
cheated. It is marvellous the importance I find I have 
stepped into. There has been an expedition over to see. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 57 

my house that is to be ; and my sisters have settled the 
drawing-room paper, and the color of the curtains, and 
promised to set up my penny club for me. I never told 
you, by the by, where this said establishment was to be. 
It is one of the suburbs of Morville, so I shall have a 
fashionable audience. And I hear there is already a 
schism at the tea-parties ; one side have settled that I am 
' a Puseyite, and another, that that is impossible, because 
I have such beautiful eyes. My eccentricities, which 
used to be my shame, have now become " so interesting.'' 
One young lady says Selina will do for me, she is so like 
me — so enthusiastic ; another thinks that a good little 
plain common-sense, brisk, practical body, is what I want, 
and so Clara was exactly made for me. My sisters do 
not particularise names, but one thinks, and the other 
thinks, and they look knowing, and say, " Well, we shall 
see." " As long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will 
speak good of thee ;" what a word is there ! It is hard, 
though, that the kind words won't come, when one most 
wants them. But it is a shame of me to be grumbling 
now. 

My father has prescribed a good body of Anglican 
divinity. By the by, how coolly we appropriate that 
word, Arthur. Go into a picture gallery, and ask whose 
that rosy full-fed face may be, looking out from those 
rounded and frilled canonicals, and you are told it is 
Bishop So-and-So, an eminent divine; and then one 



58 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

thinks of the Author of the Kevelation, the only person, 
I believe, besides our own Anglicans, who has been 
thought worthy of that title. Well, any how, I am to 
have the divinity ; though I cannot say that in any one 
of those worthy writers, except in Butler and in Berkeley, 
I could ever take much pleasure. But I will try — by 
and by, not now ; I have closed up my books, much to 
my father's dismay, who is in alarm for my examination. 
The Bishop has formed a high opinion of me, and should 
not be disappointed. But, since my degree, I have read 
almost nothing but church history, and criticism, and 
theology of all sorts, and in all languages ; and as I am 
gorged with it to the full, and as it has but left me where 
I am, or where I was, it is wiser, perhaps, to leave it. 
And now that every thing is settled, dear Arthur, write 
me a nice bright letter. I have a fountain of cold water 
playing inside my own heart, which all but extinguishes 
me — don't visit me with any more. It is but smoking, 
my flax ; do not quench it ; and when you come to see 
me, either soon, or in after years, you shall find me — not 
with six children and a pony carriage, and rosy cheeks, 
and much anxieties on my turnip crop — not pale with 
long watchings over folios, nor with oiled hair inditing 
hymn-books for the pious children of the upper classes — 
not correcting the press of my last missionary sermon — 
but, I hope, a happier and -a better man than I am now — 
and always your dear friend, Arthur. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 59 



^ 



LETTER VIII. 

Morville, Jan. 1. 
7"ELL, my dear friend, it is over ; for good or evil I 



am committed finally to my calling, and I must 
abide by it. With three-fourths of what I have under- 
taken it will be with all my heart — with the remaining 

fourth — with 

I do not console myself with the futile foolishness 
which whispers to me that so many do the same ; for, 
with such self-contradictory formularies as those to 
which we bind ourselves, with Articles insisting on our 
finding one thing in the Bible, and a Liturgy insisting on 
another, yet the Articles committing themselves to the 
Liturgy, while notwithstanding they tell us, too, that the 
Bible is the only rule of faith ; it is impossible for any 
one who has ever thought or read to take them all with- 
out straining his conscience one way or another ; I dare 
say this is true ; yet what others may have to do is 
nothing to me : I am only concerned with myself. In 
theory it is a thorny road enough ; but practically it is 
trodden in by so many sorts that I shall make shift to 
get. along. I was ordained deacon privately a fortnight 
before Christmas, and priest yesterday — the Sunday after 



60 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

it. Exquisite s^itire on my state of mind ! — I was com- 
plimented publicly on my examination, as having shown 
myself possessed of so much well-digested information, 
and on being so prudent in avoiding extremes. In spite 
of my protestations I was chosen to assist in the service 
yesterday, and I was told privately that I had only to 
persist in such sensible moderation, and that with my 
talents, in these trying times, I should be an ornament 
to the Church, and that its highest places might be open 
to me. But, above all, my admonition concluded — " Be 
extreme in nothing — you do not require me to remind 
you of Aristotle's caution. Puseyism is the error on one 
side, German rationalism on the other. Walk steadily in 
the position which our own admirable Church has so 
wisely chosen, equidistant between these two. Throw 
yourself into her spirit, and, with God's grace, you may 
rise hereafter to be one of those strong: lisfhts which it is 
her highest honor and her highest witness to have nur- 
tured." I felt so sick, Arthur. So, I may live to be like 
Burnet, or Tillotson, or Bishop Newton, or Archdeacon 
Paley — may I die sooner ! I had nearly said so ; but it 
was all so kind and so good, and there was such a sort of 
comfortable dignity about it, that in spite of myself I was 
awed and affected. Oh why, why, is there no confes- 
sional among us — no wise and affectionate friend with a 
commission to receive our sorrows, and with a right to 
guide us ? It is the commission we should have, Arthur; 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 61 

anybody may advise us, but we want some one to order. 
I dare say the Bishop, if I had spoken out to him, would 
have been shocked enough, and would have ordered me 
not to undertake the office ; only it would not have been 
because I thought as I did, but because of the scandal in 
a candidate for orders saying he thought so. It would 
have been nothing but a '' You must not." He would 
defend the place against me as an enemy ; but of my 
own soul might become what I could myself make of it ; 
he would have been troubled enough to have known what 
to do with that. Well, now for my duties (I suppose I 
may be extreme in them), and the blue chintz curtains, 
and the Penny Club ; and may God guide me ! 



A year's interval elapses now between the date of this 
letter and of the events to which we must now pass for- 
w^ard. Sutherland was busy, and wrote less frequently 
than before ; and when they did come, his letters had 
lost something of that passionate truthfulness of tone 
which made them so telling even in their weakness. 
They were mostly of the self-blinded sort, and, as his 
power was but scanty in that line, they were poor of 
their kind. It appeared as if he was endeavoring to 
persuade himself that he was contented and happy; 
when it was too clear that all was still wrong with him, 



62 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. • 

that he had but silenced himself, not replied to himself; 
and that the wound which, had it continued open, might 
have made progress towards healing, or, at worst, con- 
tinued but itself, being now closed over was corrupting 
inwardly, and the next outbreak might be far worse than 
the first. No censure shall be passed upon his conduct 
here ; and the casting of stones shall be left to those who 
are happy in a purer conscience than I can boast of. 
Some persons may find it easy and obvious to condemn 
him ; others may wonder at the foolishness of so much 
excitement over such a very trifle, and regard such 
excessive sensibility as a kind of moral disease. But I, 
who was his friend, am unequal to either, and consider 
myself happy in having but to tell the story as it was ; 
to relate the facts as they grew into their consequences ; 
the judgment which Providence passed upon him — on 
the whole, perhaps, a judgment as just as that Power's 
judgments usually are found to be. We had kept our 
misgivings to ourselves ; but from the first we had felt 
all of us a painful conviction that Sutherland's was not a 
mind to compose itself as he proposed and expected ; and 
that the ideas which were disturbing him were of a kind 
which would grow, whatever his own will liked to say 
about it. Again, his occupation was sure to prove less 
agreeable than he hoped to find it. To be enthusiastic 
about doing much with human nature is a foolish busi- 
ness indeed ; and, throwing himself into his work as he 



. THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 63 

was doing, and expecting so much from it, would not the 
tide ebb as strongly as it was flowing? It is a rash 
game this setting our hearts on any future beyond what 
we have our own selves control over. Things do not 
walk as we settle with ourselves they ought to walk, and 
to hope is almost the correlative of to be disappointed. 
Moreover, for the practical work of this world (and a 
parson's work ' is no exception), a thinking man is far 
more likely to require the support of a creed to begin 
with, than to find the quarry in his work out of which 
he can sculpture one. Let his uncle the dean say what 
he pleased, it is no such easy matter after all to believe 
that all the poor unhappy beings we have left to rot in 
ignorance and animalism, with minds scarcely so well 
cultivated as the instinct of a well-trained brute ; that 
the fashionable loungers of the higher classes, and the 
light, good-tempered, gossip-dealing, ball-going young 
ladies, have really and truly immortal souls, which God 
came down from heaven to redeem, and for which He 
and the Devil are contending. It is easy to talk largely 
of the abstract dignity of humanity, and to take Socrates 
or Shakespeare for a type of it. One can understand 
something of spirits such as theirs continuing, because 
we see they do continue ; but really, with the mass of 
us, one would think the most reasonable as well as the 
kindest thing which could be done would be to put us 
out. The stars want no snuffing ; but I fear, if we are 



64 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

all to be kept burning, whoever has the trimming of us 
will have work enough. Neither good enough for 
heaven, nor bad enough for the other place, we oscillate 
in the temperate inertia of folly ; answering no end what- 
ever either of God or Devil ; surely, one would think, we 
should be put out. 

At any rate, for this unfortunate normal state of the 
mass of mankind, Markham was not calculating ; he was, 
he thought, to be teaching men to love good and hate 
evil, and hardly any one oi those he came in contact with 
would have power really to do either one or the other. 
Love and hate of such matters are intellectual passions^ 
with whose names we must not dignify the commonplace 
selfishness or respectabilities of common people, who may 
like and may dislike, but cannot love and cannot hate. 
He fancied he was going to make the lot of poverty 
more tolerable : as far as giving away money went, no 
doubt he succeeded ; but it was unlucky for him that his 
parish lay on the outskirts of a large town. His poor 
were the operative poor, whose senses were too keenly 
quickened to let them sink into contentment, while they 
lived side by side with luxury which they knew was 
trampling them under foot while it was feeding itself 
upon their life juices ; living, as they were, for the most 
part in filth and vice, yet without that torpor of faculty 
which helps the agricultural poor through their sufferings ; 
without the sense of home either which these have, or of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 65 

the feudalism which secures the most ill-deserving- land- 
lord something of their respect and of their hearts. It 
was ill-dealing for Markham with such as they ; he was 
one of the hated order. They would take his mouey 
with a kind of sullen thanks, as if they knew very well 
they were but receiving a small instalment of their own 
rights ; but it was impossible to make them learn from 
him; and their hard stern questions often wrung from 
him the bitter self-confession, that the doctrinal food 
which the Church had to offer to men of stamp like that 
was but like watered chaff for the giant dray-horse of 
the coal-yard. He could have more easily touched them 
if he had spoken out what once had been his own feel- 
ings ; but he had consented to be a declaiming instru- 
ment. He could only speak now— not as man to man 
but as thing to thing; and when he found a man who 
would speak his own old doubts to him, he discovered 
that he had not been rewarded for his submission with 
any enlightenment to answer them. 



E 



66 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



LETTER IX. 
My dear Friend, 

SOMETHING very uncomfortable has befallen me; a 
fool can fire a powder magazine as well as the wisest 
of us; and in spite of the mournful absurdity which 
hangs about the story, I cannot tell in what disaster it 
may not conclude. However, I will not anticipate ; you 
shall have it all ab initio. You know, in all large 
towns, there are those very detestable things, religious 
tea-parties. In this place, where there are such a num- 
ber of business people, who have either retired from 
business themselves, or have withdrawn their families 
out of its atmosphere to make idle ladies and gentlemen 
of them, they are particularly rife; all people want 
some excitement, and as they are in too uneasy a position 
in this world, and common ordinary intercourse with 
one another is too vulgar to suit their ambition, they flit 
about in the shadow of the other world ; and with wax 
lights and psalm singing, and edifying conversation, 
entertain one another with evening soirees, in imitation, 
as they fancy, of the angels. I hate these things, and as 
I have never cared to avoid saying so, I have of course 
made myself innumerable enemies, partly because I 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 67 

ought to be shining among them as the central figure, 
and partly for the reason I have given for my dislike. 
I fear the main element of angel tea-parties is seldom 
there. These people can really have very little love for 
one another from the delight with which they mourn 
over each other's failings, and when, unhappily, no such 
topic has newly presented itself, the edifying talk con- 
sists in the showing up of the poor Puseyites ; or, if the 
party happen to be Puseyite, in the sort of self-sltisfied 
sham business-like-we-are-the-wise assumption, which is 
even more intolerable. I suppose the angels do not 
stimulate the monotony of their lives by half-envious 
stories of the unlawful words or unlawful enjoyments of 
the other place, do they Arthur ? Well, my place on the 
occasion has been commonly supplied by the town 
curates and rectors, who have done the honours, no 
doubt, far better than I could do them ; and I was con- 
tented to let it be so, and think no more about the 
matter. But it seems I must have made myself the 
occasion of a great deal of talk. I didn't marry any of 
them— that was the first great sin. I patronised no socie- 
ties, and I threw cold water on philanthropy schemes. 
The clergy ! I hope it is not wrong of me, but I cannot 
like them. Though I have not avoided their acquaint- 
ance, we have never got on; and after one or two ineffec- 
tual attempts, we have tacitly given up all hopes of 
intimacy. I never saw the clouds gathering. The Bishop 



68 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

cautioned me against party, and here it has been my sin 
that I am of none. What is not understood is suspected ; 
and, what is worse, it is for ever talked about. It is one 
of the oddest of men's infirmities, that no talk of what 
they do understand, is spicy enough to interest them. 
Well, never mind, I must tell my story. About a fort- 
night ago I was asked to dine with the Hickmans. They 
are one of the few families that I really like here. Miss 
Hickman and I often meet in the dark staircases and the 
back alleys; and, though the least trifle in the world given 
to cant, they have enough good sense and active conscience 
about them to be saved from any serious harm from it. 
I had often been there before, and yet 1 felt a strange 
reluctance on this unhappy evening. I think there is a 
spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they 
say birds scent storms. I felt somewhat assured on 
entering the drawing-room. I was the last; and of the six 
or seven people present, there was only one I did not know 
at all, and one more with whom I was not intimate — 
this last, a young lady, a Miss Lennox, a niece of Mrs. 
Hickman, who had been for some weeks staying with 
them. The other was the newly-arrived rector of a 
parish in the neighborhood, who, I understood, had 
brought with him a reputation of cleverness, and was 
shortly to be married to the young lady. No one was 
coming in the evening ; alas ! who could have guessed 
from the plain unthreatening surface of that quiet little 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 69 

assembly, what a cunning mine had been run below it, — 
that I had been brought there to be dragged into an 
argumentary examination in which this new-found 
chymist was to analyse me, to expose my structure for 
his bethrothed's spiritual pleasure, his own vanity, and 
the parish scandal. Well, unsuspecting, I went on toler- 
ably well for some time : I rather liked the fellow. He 
was acute, not unwitty, and with a savior faire about him 
which made his tallc a pleasing variety to me. Once or 
twice the ladies made some serious remarks; but he, as well 
as I, appeared to shrink from mixing more religion with 
our dinner than the grace which went before and which 
succeeded it ; and in the half-hour we were left together 
after the ladies were gone, there was nothing to make 
me change my mind about him, except that I felt I 
could never be his friend ; he kncAv too much and felt 
too little. 

In the evening the conversation turned on a projected 
meeting of the Bible Society, where they were all going. 
There was much talk — v/hat such talk is you know. 
Nothing at first was directly addressed to me, so I took 
no part in it. The good rector came out with really 
some tolerably eloquent discoursing ; and the poor ladies 
drank up his words ; oh, you should have seen them. 
I fancy the fair fiancee drank a little too much of them, 
and got rather spiritually intoxicated — at least I hope 
she did — as some excuse for her. As he went rollinof on 



70 THE NEMESIS OE FAITH. 

for an hour or more, he described the world as grinding 
between the nether millstone of Popery and the upper 
millstone of Infidelity, and yet a universal millenium 
was very near indeed through this Bible activity. At 
the end he turned sharp upon me. Of course Mr. 
Sutherland would feel it his duty to take the chair on so 
truly blessed an occasion ? 

Now, conceive societies, with chairmen, dragging a 
the poor world from between two such millstones ! ! 

'' I believe you need not ask Mr. Sutherland," the 
young lady said, in a tone of satiric melancholy : "he 
never preaches the Bible." 

I didn't laugh. I was very near it ; but I luckily 
looked first at Mrs. Hickman, and saw her looking so 
bitterly distressed — and distressed, too, (how much a look 
can say !) from her partly sharing her niece's feelings, 
that I gathered up as much gravity as I could command. 
'' I believe I read it to you twice every day/' I sai d, 
" and my sermons are a great deal better than my own 
practice, perhaps than the practice of most of us." She 
colored, because she thinks daily service formal and 
superstitious. I do not know what indignation would 
not have bubbled out of her lips, when the rector heroi- 
cally flew in to the rescue, and with suflficient tact only 
noticed her with a smile, and repeated his own question. 

" I fear not," I said. '' I shrink from meetings where 
a number of people are brought together, not to learn 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 71 

something Avhich they are themselves to do, but to give 
money to help others in a remote employment. There is 
a great deal of talking and excitement, and they go away 
home fancying they have been doing great things, when 
they have, in fact, only been stirring up some unprofit- 
able feeling, and giving away a few shillings or pounds, 
when all their active feeling and all the money they can 
spare is far more properly required at home. Charity is 
from person to person ; and it loses half, far more than 
half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into 
personal relation with those to whom he gives." 

" Mr. Sutherland is general enough, and perhaps vague 
enough," was the answer. " Permit me to keep to my 
subject. The Bible Society in the course of each year 
disperses over the world hundreds of thousands of Bibles 
in many different languages. The Word of God is sent 
into lands of Egyptian darkness, and souls at least may 
come to saving knowledge who else were lost without 
hope." 

I said coldly, I was sorry. I found my own duties far 
beyond my powers both of mind and money. I had only 
expressed my own feelings to explain my own conduct. 
I passed no opinion about others. 

"I fear you cannot defend yourself on so general a 
ground without reflecting upon others, Mr. Sutherland," 
he said. " I could understand you, in a manner sympa- 
thise with you, if you took the ground of objection so 



72 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

many good churchmen take, in declining to act with a 
mixed body ; but in this case, I fear, pardon me, I think 
you have some other reason. I do not fancy the objects 
of the society can entirely meet your approbation, or you 
would not have spoken so coldly. 

Miss Lennox was looking infinitely disagreeable ; the 
Hickmans as much concerned. The vulgar impertinence 
of such offensive personality disgusted me out of temper. 
Partly, too, I was annoyed at feeling he had heard, or 
she had been cunning enough to see, I had some par- 
ticular feeling on the point beyond what I had spoken 
out. 

"Yes," I said, "it is true I hav^e particular feelings 
I dislike societies generally; I would join in none of 
them. For your society in particular, as you insist on 
my telling you, I think it is the very worst, with the 
establishment of which I have been acquainted. Consid- 
ering all the heresies, the enormous crimes, the wickedness, 
the astounding follies which the Bible has been made to 
justify, and which its indiscriminate reading has suggested 
considering that it has been, indeed, the sword which 
our Lord said that he was sending ; that not the Devil 
himself could have invented an implement more potent to 
fill the hated world with lies, and blood, and fury ; I think, 
certainly, that to send hawkers over the world loaded 
with copies of this book, scattering it in all places among 
all persons — not teaching them to understand it; not 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 73 

standing, like Moses, between that heavenly light and 
them ; but cramming it into their own hands as God's 
book, which He wrote, and they are to read, each for 
himself, and learn what they can for themselves — is the 
most culpable folly of which it is possible for man to be 
guilty." 

I had hardly spoken before I felt how wrong, how 
foolish, I had been ; and that a mere vulgar charlatan, as 
T felt the man was, should have had the power to pro- 
voke me so ! I had said nothing which was not perfectly 
true, in fact; but I ought to have known it was not true 
to the ignorant women who were listening with eyes 
fixed and ears quivering, as if the earth was to open and 
swallow a blasphemer — What did they know of the 
world's melancholy history ? 

I saw Mr. 's eyes sparkle as he felt the triumph I 

was giving him, and his next word showed me it had 
been a preconcerted plan. 

'* It is as I told you," he said, turning away from me ; 
'' the enemy is among us." The ladies gathered together 
for mutual protection in a corner. 

''What do you mean, Sir?" I said; "this is most un- 
warrantable language. With what purpose did you 
come here ? " 

" Language, Sir !" he sighed, " unwarrantable ! — I 
might ask you, Sir, what you mean — with what purpose 
you are come a wolf among these sheep? They know 



74 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

you now, Mr. Sutherland. I knew what you were 
before, but your disguise had been too cunning for 
their eyes." 

Mrs. Hickman looked the picture of despair; quite 
wretched enough to disarm any anger I might feel 
at her. 

''Really, Madam," I said, rising, "if you have con- 
nived at this scene, you must be sufficiently punished at 
its results. I will not add to your pain by continuing 
my presence." The miserable young lady was flushed 
with exultation ; the rector had smoothed himself into 
an expression of meek triumph in a successful exorcism 
I had been too much in the wrong myself to enable me 
to say then what might have to be said. I would wait 
till the next morning, which I supposed must bring my 
hostess's apology, and so bowed coldly and departed. 
The whole thing was so very insufferably bad that I 
could not even let myself think of what 1 was to do till 
I had considered it coolly. I went home and went to bed. 
The next morning came, but no note, and the day passed 
without any; and I began to feel, as a clergyman, in a most 
embarrassing position indeed. As a man, it was far too 
contemptible to affect me ; but as I thought it over, I saw 
that it was a seriously concerted design, whether from 
dislike or suspicion — what I do not know — to attack my 
position, and I had not heard the end of it. I called once 
or twice at the Hickmans, but they were not at home to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 75 

me ; long faces began to show about the parish. It was 
evident tongues had been busy, and last Sunday the 
church was half empty. I was at a loss what to resolve 
upon, and had been thinking over various plans, when 
something came this evening which is likely to resolve it 
all for me and save me the trouble. My folly has bred 
its consequence ; the word flies out and has a life of its 
own, and goes its own way and does its own work. Just 
now a note was brought me, a very kind one, from the 
Bishop, requesting me to take an early opportunity of 
calling on him : if I were not engaged, fixing to-morrow 
morning. The sooner down the better with all nasty 
medicine, from the first magnesia draught to the death 
finish. I shall present myself at the first moment. I 
can have no doubt of the occasion. 



76 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 



LETTER X. 

WELL, it is over, this interview; and a great deal 
else is over, I believe. He is a good man, a really 
good man, and a great one. Would to God I had been 
open with him before ! however, it is idle lamenting now. 
You shall hear : I found him alone of course ; I was 
shown into his study ; he was good enough to remember 
that the moments we are kept waiting for such inter- 
views are not the very sweetest, and he joined me almost 
immediately. There was a grave kindness in his manner, 
which told me at once I had been right in looking for 
unpleasantness, and his good sense kept him from hang- 
ing on the edge of what was inevitable. He said he was 
very sorry, &c., and that I was not to regard what he was 
going to say to me as in the least official ; whether any- 
thing of that kind might have to follow, would depend 
very much on what he heard from' me. In the mean 
time he wished to speak to me, as a friend, on some very 
serious matter which had been communicated to him. I 
bowed. He said he concluded from m.y manner that I 
was prepared for what was coming ; and then he went 
on, that I was said to have used certain very incautious 
language, to say the least of it, at a private party in my 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 77 

parish, on the subject of the Bible Society. Perhaps in 
itself it was not a thing which he could fcrmally notice. 
With the society in question he had as little sympathy 
as I could have; and he could easily understand that a 
young man of strong feelings might have been led to 
express himself with an unwise vehemence. But T must 
be aware how strongly inclined foolish people were to 
misunderstand and misrepresent, and how extremely 
cautious in my position I was bound to be. He stopped 
there ; so, as well as I could, I thanked him for his kind- 
ness. I said I knew I had been very unwise, and, as 
nearly as I could remember them, I repeated the exact 
words which I had used. He answered very truly, with 
a sort of a smile, that words like those, unexplained, 
were quite as dangerous as anything I could find in the 
subject of them. But then, he went on, that this was not 
aJl he had to say to me. There was another matter, and 
a more serious one, he was sorry to tell me, of which he 
hoped I could give explanation. I had now been a year 
at my parish, and on all, except on one point, he was 
happy to tell me that if I had not exactly pleased my 
people, it was their fault, not mine. But a very serious 
complaint had been made to him on the nature of my 
sermons. He need not go into detail ; but he had been 
informed generally that during that entire season I had 
not preached a single one which might not have been a 
Socinian's. He did not charge me with having taught 



78 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Socinianism ; on the contrary (and perhaps, as a general 
rule, I had done wisely), I had steadily avoided all doc- 
trine ; but that I had not said a word to prove that I 
held opinions which Socinians did not hold, on the points 
on which they differed from us ; neither on the incarna- 
tion nor on the atonement, as such, had I ever directly 
spoken. I was silent. " I presume it is true," he con- 
tinued, " and from your present manner, that it has been 
purposely so." " Yes," I said. He waited for me to go 
on. '' If the Catholic doctrine be true," I said; he start- 
ed ; " if the Catholic doctrine be true," I repeated, " it is 
so overwhelming a mystery, that I cannot think of 
it without it crashing me. I cannot bring myself to 
speak in public of it, before such a mixed assembly, or 
lend myself to the impiety (I can use no other word) with 
which the holiest secret of our faith is made common and 
profane. I think there is no one in my parish to whom, 
even in private, I should feel it possible to speak 
upon it." 

" Then you have not spoken in private either ? " 

" I have never been sought. If I had, however, I 
should probably have been still silent." 

" You said if the Catholic doctrine be true — you 
observed that I remarked your words, and you desired 
that I should do so, from your repeating them. Am I to 
suppose that you have any doubts about it ? " 

" My lord," I said, " you were good enough to tell me 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 79 

you were speaking to me as a friend, and I will show 
you my thanks by being entirely open with you. Many 
times I have been on the point of volunteering a confes- 
sion to you ; I have only been withheld by an unmanly 
fear ; a doubt of how you might receive it. However, I 
will speak now. I owe my situation to your goodness, 
and perhaps I have hitherto made a bad return to you. 
Now I put myself without reserve in your hands, and 
whatever you think I ought to do, I will do. Never, 
either by word or action, until this if, have I given 
reason to living man to suppose I did question it. B ut 
that in these times every serious person should not in his 
heart have felt some difficulty with the doctrines of the 
incarnation, I cannot believe. We are not as we were. 
When Christianity was first published, the imagination 
of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth 
very differently from what it does now. When heaven 
was one place, and earth was another, imaginatively co- 
extensive, extended under it — with, in every nation, a 
belief in a constant intercourse between them, shadowing 
itself out in legends of God's appearing upon earth, and 
mortals elevated among gods — it cannot but have seemed 
far simpler then that this earth should have been the 
scene of a mystery so tremendous, than it can now seem 
to us, knowing what we do of this little earth's infinite 
insignificance. But as this is but an imaginative 
difficulty, so it has not been on this, but rather on the 



80 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

moral side of the doctrine, that I have found my own 
deepest perplexity. I will be candid. I believe God is a 
just God, rewarding and punishing us exactly as we act 
well or ill. I believe that such reward and punishment fol- 
low necessarily from His will as revealed in natural law, 
as well as in the Bible. I believe that as the highest 
justice is the highest mercy, so He is a merciful God. 
That the guilty should suffer the mea-ure of penalty 
which their guilt has incurred, is justice. What we 
call mercy is not the remission of this, but rather the 
remission of the extremity of the sentence attached to 
the act, when we find something in the nature of 
the causes which led to the act, which lightens the 
moral guilt of the agent. That each should have his 
exact due is just — is the best for himself. That the 
consequence of his guilt should be transferred from him 
to one who is innocent (although that innocent one be 
himself willing to accept it), whatever else it be, is not 
justice. We are mocking the word when we call it such. 
If I am to use the word justice in any sense at all which 
human feeling attaches to it, then to permit such transfer 
is but infinitely deepening the wrong, and seconding the 
first fault by greater injustice, I am speaking only of the 
doctrine of the atonement in its human aspect, and as we 
are to learn anything from it of the divine nature or of 
human duty. To suppose that by our disobedience we 
have taken something away from God, in the loss of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 81 

which He suffers, for which He requires satisfaction, and 
that this satisfaction has been made to Him by the cross 
sacrifice (as if doing wrong were incurring a debt to Him, 
which somehow must be paid, though it matters not by 
whom), is so infinitely derogatory to His majesty, to 
every idea which I can form of His nature, that to 
believe it in any such sense as this confounds and over- 
whelms me. In the strength of my own soul, for myself, 
at least, I would say boldly, rather let me bear the conse- 
quences of my own acts myself, even if it be eternal 
vengeance, and God requires it, than allow (he shadow of 
my sin to fall upon the innocent." 

I stopped. He said, quietly, '' You have more to say, 
go on." 

I continued. " I know that in early ages men did 
form degraded notions of the Almighty, painting Him, 
like themselves, extreme only in their passions ; they 
thought He could be as lightly irritated as themselves, 
and that they could appease His anger by wretched 
offerings of innocent animals. From such a feeling as 
this to the sense of the value of a holy and spotless life 
and death — from the sacrifice of an animal to that of a 
saint — is a step forward out of superstition quite immea- 
surable. That between the earnest conviction of partial 
ight, and the strong metaphors of vehement minds, the 
sacrificial language should have been transferred onwards 
from one to the other, seems natural to me — perhaps 



82 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

inevitable. On the other hand, through all history we 
find the bitter fact that mankind can only be persuaded 
to accept the best gifts which Heaven sends them, in 
persecuting and destroying those who are charged to be 
their bearers. Poetry and romance shadow out the same 
truth as the stern and mournful rule under which Heaven 
is pleased to hold us, that men must pay their best to it 
as the price of what they receive. I understand this — I 
can understand, as I can conceive, that as the minds of 
men grow out into larger mould, these two ideas united 
into one, in such a doctrine as that which we are now 
taught to hold. 

" But if I am to believe that in plain prose it is true 
as a single fact — not which happens always, but which 
has happened once for all — that before the world was 
made it was predetermined so, and we must obey the 
Bible, and allow that this is justice and this is mercy ; 
then in awe and perplexity I turn away from the Bible, 
not knowing, if it use our words in a sense so different, 
so utterly different, from any which we attach to them, 
what may not be the mystical meaning of any or every 
verse and fragment of it. It has but employed the 
words which men use to mock and deceive them. A re- 
velation ! Oh, no ! no revelation ; only renderifig the 
hard life-enigma tenfold harder. I thank you very much 
for bearing with me. I will but say, in conclusion, that 
I do not disbelieve that in some mysterious transcendental 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 83 

sense, as involved in the system of the entire universe, 
with so vast an arc that.no faculty of man can apprehend 
its curve, that in some such sense the Catholic doctrine of 
the atonement may be true. But a doctrine out of 
which, with our reason, our feeling, our logic, I, at least, 
can gather any practical instruction for mankind — any 
deeper appreciation of the attributes of God, any deeper 
love for Him, any stimulant towards our own obedience 
— such a doctrine I cannot find it. I bury what I am to 
think of it in the deepest corner of my own heart, where 
myself I fear to look. 

It was said and over. And oh ! what a relief I felt. 
A weight which had been sinking me to the earth was 
taken off. I was an honest man again with nothing 
more to conceal, and follow now what might, I had done 
my duty, and I was not responsible. 

He said my convictions seemed deeply thought — were 
they altogether new ? formed since the time of my taking 
orders ? 

I said I would be frank with him again. I had had 
very great difficulty in taking orders. At that time my 
feelings were far less defined than they were at present ; 
but even then I had anxiously desired an explanation 
with him, and it had only been the advice of others 
(which I had never sufficiently regretted having followed,) 
which had deterred me. I was told, and I partly believed 
it, that my uncomfortable feelings were the result of 



34 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

want of employment, of my mind being so entirely flung 
in upon itself; that they were but symptoms of a 
disease which required only exercise for its cure. I de- 
termined, for myself, that I would submit absolutely, in 
all I said and did ; in no way hint a doubt even to my- 
self • and, in, I believe, a spirit of real humility, I did 
endeavour with all my heart to see the truth as the 
Church sees it. It had pleased God to govern my mind 
in His way, not in mine. I had bitterly repented my 
orders, for I felt my uneasiness not pass away, but deep- 
en into conviction. I was now more grateful for this 
opportunity which he had given me of speaking out, than 
any words could tell him. I had not come prepared to 
make so full a confession ; but I had been forced on by 
an impulse which I could not, if I had wished, control. 
And now I threw myself on his hands, to do with me as 
he thought right. 

He said nothing for some time. He sat silent. His 
thoughts appeared to have left me, and travelled off on 
some abstracted interest. I had no more to speak. I 
did not interupt him. After perhaps a quarter of an 
hour, he seemed to make an effort to collect himself, and 
said sharply, " Of course i have but one duty." But the 
tone showed it was to himself he was speaking, not to 
me. Presently he turned to me, and said with a voice of 
mournful kindness, " May God help you, my son ! It is 
a terrible trial. Only He who is pleased to send such 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 85 

temptation can give you strength to bear it. You shall 
have my prayers .... and my blessing . . . 
not as your Bishop, Markham. I cannot bless you as 
your Bishop. But as an old man and an old friend, who 
can still love you and feel for you, yes, such a blessing 
you shall not want, my poor, poor boy." There were 
tears in his eyes. I was prepared for anything but this : 
for any rebuke, for any harshness. T could not contain 
myself. I burst into tears too. I caught his hand and 
kissed it. He did not take it from me ; but his eyes 
were seeking heaven and God, and his lips were fast 
moving. Was it for me, was it for himself that he was 
praying ? I knew not, I might not, I would not hear. But 
his overflowing heart poured out its secrets. Broken words 
fell in upon my ears which I could not choose but catch. 
He was praying to be taken away from the evil day, that 
last dreadful time of terror, when the Devil should have 
the power for a season over hearts not sealed with the 
Devil's mark, when even the elect would be tempted to 
deny their Lord. 

Well, I cannot tell you more of this, how kind he was, 
how much I was overcome. He thanked me for my 
candor, as he called it, while he allowed how bitterly it 
distressed — it embarrassed him : once there was a pas- 
sionate burst, " You, too, of whom I had heard so much, 
and formed so many hopes .... I knew more of 
you than you supposed, and sympathized more with you; 



86 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

yours is a mind of no common order, and I had looked, 
yes, I had looked to you, I had hoped that you, with a 
knowledge of the power of that spirit of antichrist which 
is now working in this world, so different from anything 
which we knew, or now at our age can ever learn, that 
you might have been a chosen champion of the Church. 
God's will be done — and our duty ; of course I cannot (I 
would not if I could) take any public steps in conse- 
quence of what you have disclosed to me ; and I am sure 
you yourself are too high-minded to take advantage of 
your situation or mine ; what I advise you, you will do. 
You cannot remain where you are ; give your mind time, 
and try other scenes ; go travel, see what men are ; see 
what all men are or must become who allow their faith 
to glide out of their hearts, as you have allowed yours ; 

and you may yet, by God's grace I 

cannot tell— I have little hopes, they have all gone ; yes, 
there is not one, not one in all these many years which I 
have seen upon the earth, not one man of more than com- 
mon power who has been contented to abide in the 
old ways." He was half speaking to himself, half to 
me. He took down a book from his shelves — it was the 
confession of the Vicar of Savoy. He saw I knew it. 
" This does not content you," he said ; " you cannot — 
you are too honest far, to take his terms for yours, and 
continue on in your position as he held on in his ! No ! 
you will go ; I will find some one to supply your place in 



THE NEMESIS OF^FAITH. 87 

your absence, and you will be generous in what you will 
leave him. If at the end of three years your mind is 
not changed, I think you will leave the service for ever 
which is not yours, and you will not shrink from what 
you will lose by it. 

I answered at once my benefice was in his hands; 
what changes my mind might pass through I could not 
tell ; but that if— if I ever came to feel that I had been 
walking in a delirious dream, and that the old way was 
the true way, it would be with far too deep humiliation to 
permit me ever again to dare to become its minister. A few 
words, he did not mean of common-place advice, against 
over haste, against imprudence, was all the weak opposi- 
tion which he made to this. My living is resigned — my 
employment gone. I am again free— again happy ; and 
all the poor and paltry net-work in which I was entan- 
gled, the weak intrigues which like the flies in the sum- 
mer irritate far worse than more serious evils, I have 
escaped them all ; and if the kind good people who have 
brought all this about, can find any miserable pleasure in 
what they will suppose their victory; each one of the 
thousand pluming himself or herself on the real secret — 
the exact story — the only true, full, perfect and sufficient 
account of Mr. Sunderland's disgrace, let them have it, I 
can afford it; they gain their pleasure, I do but lose 
what perhaps it is our best credit to be without — the 
world's good opinion. All I really grieve for is my 



88 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

father. He, they, all of them, will never forgive me ; 
the old feelings, or far worse than the old, will flow back 
now into the old channel, and my small measure of affec- 
tion will turn sour in the thunder storm, and curdle into 
contempt. It must be so, I shall go away, and they will 
forget me when they do not see me. Perhaps if I live 
beyond their eyes, and my vexing presence is not by to 

irritate, I may be at least endured — tolerated 

and in after year when what now they most value has 
proved its hollowness ; when the world passes by them 
and through them, and they learn at last that they can 
not take it with them, cannot gain from it one kind 
smile they do not pay for ; that the world with all its 
power, splendor, caresses, promises, for all the love we 
waste upon it, cannot love us, for it is heartless ; perhaps 
then But I will not dwell upon so melan- 
choly a picture. 

M. 



It is an easy way to get rid of the difficulties of this 
world, to say, in the off-hand way in which it is com- 
monly said, that if a man cannot get along with it, it is 
all his own fault ; that the world is a looking-glass which 
gives every man his own image ; that he has no one to 
blame but himself ; that he is not active enough ; that 
he is not sensible enough ; not enough of any thing 
that he should be, and too much of every thing he should 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 89 

not be ; that he expects what he cannot fiDc], and does not 
choose to be contented with what he can ; anyhow to 
shift the responsibility of his failure off Nature's 
shoulders upon his own. And yet I think Nature, if she 
interests herself much about her children, must often feel 
that, like the miserable Frankenstein, with her experi- 
menting among the elements of humanity, she has 
brought beings into existence who have no business here ; 
who can do none of her work, and endure none of her 
favors ; whose life is only suffering, and whose action is 
one long protest against the ill foresight which flung 
them into consciousness. 

I cannot understand why the worst sentence which 
could be pronounced against the worst man that ever 
lived, should be nothing more than that it were better for 
him if he had never been born. Surely it were better 
for half mankind if they had never been born, considering 
the use they make of themselves ; and then the stage 
would be left clear for the other half, and both sides 
would be such infinite gainers. The vicious, the foolish, 
and the passionate would escape a service which is 
torture to them, and the others would be spared the 
nuisance of such disagreeable companionship. There is 
already a fear the earth is growing overpeopled, and this 
matter might really be taken into consideration. MrjSlv 
ayai/ should be the maxim, and in future no colonists 



90 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

should be sent into this world who have too much or too 
little of any thing. 

The class of persons who get on best here, who under- 
stand nature, and whom nature understands, are the good 
sort of prudent people, who push their way along the 
beaten track, neither loving very strongly, nor loved very 
strongly. Allowing the heart to have a voice when it 
does not plead against understanding, they do not exactly 
love their neighbors, but they keep on broad terms of 
reasonable good- will with them ; liking such as do not 
stand painfully in their way, and sympathising as far as 
they can feel sympathy with all sensible persons like 
themselves. They form their attachments, connubial and 
otherwise, for mutual convenience and comfort; and in 
the routine of profitable occupation, intermittent like 
night and day with their hours of pleasant relaxation, 
they pass through their seventy years with no rest dis- 
turbed by any more painful emotion than what might 
arise from an infirm digestion, or a doubtful pecuniary 
speculation. They love, they fear, they hope, they pray> 
they fulfill all their duties to earth and heaven on the 
broad principles of moral economy ; and having walked 
as the world judges them with unblemished integrity, and 
lived prudently within their incomes, money income and 
soul income, and never permitted themselves in extrava- 
gance in either, they entertain well grounded hopes of con- 
tinued prosperity beyond the grave. And most likely they 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 91 

will find them realized ; they have the monopoly of this 
world s good — they form the world's law and the world's 
opinions, as the favorites and the exponents of the will of the 
higher Powers ; and " coming in no misfortune like other 
folk, neither being plagued like other men," wherever 
they are they will be still themselves ; and carrying with 
them the elements of their prosperity in their own moder- 
ation, it is difficult to conceive a state of being in which 
they could be less happy than they are. 

Why need any other sort be compelled into existence, 
besides these ? What use are fools ? What use are bad 
people ? What use are dreamers and enthusiasts ? 
Surely it cannot be necessary to have them as foils to the 
excellence of the others, and to indulge these in Pharisaic 
self-laudations that they are not as the publicans. I 
know that a holy father of the Church defines one mode 
of the happiness of the blessed to be the contemplation of 
the torments of the damned ; and I know that those who 
succeed in life do now and then make pleasant compari- 
sons of themselves with their less fortunate neighbors ; 
but one would hope, if they were asked, they would not 
say it was essential to them ; and, unless it be, it is a 
large price to pay for what could be dispensed with. I 
should be sorry to think there was so much favoritism in 
Providential government ; and I would sooner believe 
there is some impracticable necessity in the nature of 
things than accept the holy father's definition, and allow 



92 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

him to have seen clearly into the conditions of happiness 
either upon earth or in heaven. 

Yet, whatever be the cause why things are as they 
are, still to be conscious of nothing is better than to be 
conscious only of pain ; and to do nothing than to do 
what entails pain. So that whether this earth be all, 
and this little life-spark of existence flicker but its 
small time and then expire for ever ; or whether there 
be, as we are taught and we believe, some mysterious 
fuel which will still feed it through the silence of eter- 
nity ; doubtless it would be better for half of ns never 
to have been at all. Les mechants, Jean Jacques says, 
sont tres embarrassants, both in this world and in the 
next : and if we are compelled to doubt so much what 
just destination to assign to the wicked, infinitely harder 
it is to know what to do with natures which fail from 
excess of what we must call rather a kind of good than 
of evil, and from a delicacy of sensitive organization, to 
which their moral energy of character bears too small 
proportion ; men who are unable to escape from them- 
selves into healthy activity ; because they want the 
strength to carve out their own independent road, and 
the beaten roads offend their sensibility ; and are there- 
fore engaged their lives long in a hopeless struggle with 
elements too strong for them ; falling down from failure 
to failure, and either yielding at last and surrendering 
their souls to what they despise, or else lying down to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 93 

die of despair over a barren past and a future without a 
prospect. 

Whether it was a misfortune to himself or to the 
world that Markham Sutherland was born into it; 
beyond question it was a very great misfortune both to 
himself and to his family that his lot was cast among them. 
Upright and conscientious, their tempers, as we have 
partly seen, were of the broad, solid, sturdy kind ; which, 
as they never know the meaning of a refined difficulty, 
so never experience any which it is not easy for them to 
overcome. 

He was quite right in his anticipation of the way in 
which this last break-down would be received ; they did 
not mean to be unkind, but as it was clear the success by 
which they were accustomed to measure their fellow 
creatures now never could be his, and as he was the only 
one of a large family who had failed to find it, their 
minds being all constructed on a common type, to which 
his formed the only exception, their aflfections circulated 
round and round among themselves, and he lay outside 
the circle which was complete without him. You cannot 
reason people into loving those whom they are not 
drawn to love ; they cannot reason themselves into it ; 
and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too 
strong even for the obligations of relationship. Un- 
happily, too, they let themselves despise Markham, and 
where the baneful glance of contempt has once fallen, 



94 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

love is for ever banished. The feeling was not returned, 
although, perhaps, it might as deservedly have been so. 
Markham still saw much in them to love ; still struggled, 
perhaps, to make up their short-comings by his own 
fulness. His mind was wider than theiis, little as they 
thought it was ; and he could understand and make 
allowance for the unkindness which was wounding him, 
while they could make none for his disappointing 
their hopes, and being so unlike themselves. Well, he 
was quite wise in deciding to keep away from them. 
It would have been better, perhaps, if he had gone at 
once abroad ; but he was anxious, he told me, to spend 
some time at least in severer study than hitherto he had 
been able to pursue, and try if he could not calm his 
mind, instead of drowning it in the excitement of motion. 
He was going to try what philosophy would do for him^ 
and at least for a time it appeared to answer. '' One of 
two things one must have," he wrote to me, " either suffi- 
cient respect for oneself to take whatever comes, cequo 
animo, even though it be what is called damnation, I 
mean so great an honoring of oneself, or confidence in 

oneself, that nothing external can affect one , or else, 

sufficient faith in an all-powerful, external Being, of 
qualities which ensure His preserving us on both sides of 
the grave. It is a question, I think, whether we can 
have both ; but, though we may go without houses, 
carpets, horses, carriages, one of these two we cannot go 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 95 

without, under penalty of madness or suicide, or, the 
common fate of mankind, of becoming machines for the 
decomposing of dinners." He proposed the question 
fairly to himself ; it remained to be seen what he would 
make of it. I confess I had serious misgivings. 1 am 
not going to follow his pilgrimage along the road with 
any detail ; externally his life had now, for the next 
year, little variety, and a few specimens of the thoughts 
he left behind him will be enough to indicate the direction, 
and generally the sort of view of nature, of the w^orld, of 
human life, and its conditions, which are likely to be the 
goal of men who go astray from the old way as he went. 



Why is it thought so very wicked to be an unbeliever ? 
Rather, why is it assumed that no one can have diflficul- 
ties unless he be wicked ? Because an anathema upon 
unbelief has been appended as a guardian of the creed. 
It is one way, and doubtless a very politic way, of main- 
taining the creed, this of anathema. When everything 
may be lost unless one holds a particular belief, and 
nothing except vulgar love of truth can induce one into 
questioning it, common prudence points out the safe 
course ; but really it is but a vulgar evidence, this of 
anathema. 



Genuine belief ended with persecution. As soon as it 



96 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

was felt that to punish a man for maintaining an inde- 
pendent opinion was shocking and unjust, so soon a doubt 
had entered whether the faith established was unques- 
tionably true. The theory of persecution is complete. 
If it be necessary for the existence of society to put a 
man to death who has a monomania for murdering 
bodies, or to exile him for stealing what supports them ; 
infinitely more necessary is it to put to death, or send 
into exile, or to imprison those whom we know to be 
destroying weak men's souls, or stealing from them the 
dearest of all treasures. It is because — whatever we 
choo.se to say — it is because xue do not know, we are not 
sure they are doing all this mischief ; and we shrink 
from the responsibility of acting upon a doubt. 



Sometimes it is a spot of sunlight travelling over a 
dark ground — sometimes it is the black shadow of a single 
cloud, the one speck in the great ocean of light ; one 
wonders which, after all, human life is. 



Where was ever the teacher who has not felt, at least 
if not said, ''No man cometh to the Father except 
throuofh me ? " 



The end of all culture is, that we may be able to sus- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 97 

tain ourselves in a spiritual atmosphere as the birds do 
in the air. This is what philosophy teaches. Men sus* 
tained by religion, take a creed for a substitute, and hang, 
or believe that they are hanging, suspended by a 
golden chain from the throne of God. It is happy for 
mankind that they are able to do this. For mankind — 
not for philosophers. I confess it sickens me to see our 
philosophic savans, as they call themselves, swinging in 
this way mid-air among the precipices of life, examining 
a flower here, a rock there ; analysing them and cutting 
them in pieces, and discovering the combination of ele- 
ments which went to their making, and calling this 
ivisdom. What is man the wiser or the happier for 
knowing, how the air-plants feed, or how many centuries 
the flint-stone was in forming, unless the knowledge of 
them can be linked on to humanity, and elucidate for us 
some of our hard moral mysteries. 



k 



In Christianity, as in ev^ery thing else which men 
have thrown out of themselves, there is the strangest 
mixture of what is most noble with what is most 

I shrink from the only word. A 

man is born into the world — a real man — such a one as it 
has never seen; he liv^es a life consistently the verv 
highest ; his wisdom is the calm earnest voice of human- 



G 



9^ THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

ity ; to the worldly and the commonplace so exasperating, 
as forcing upon them their own worthlessness— to the 
good so admirable that every other faculty is absorbed in 
wonder. The one killed him. The other said, this is too 
good to be a man— this is God. His calm and simple life 
was not startling enough for their eager imagination ; 
acts of mercy and kindness were not enough, unless they 
were beyond the power of man. To cure by ordinary 
means the bruised body, to lift again with deep sympathy 
of heart the sinking sinner, was not enough. He must 
speak with power to matter as well as mind ; eject dis- 
eases and eject devils with command. The means of 
ordinary birth, to the oriental conception of uncleanness, 
were too impure for such as he, and one so holy could 
never dissolve in the vulgar corruption of the grave. 

Yet to save his example, to give reality to his suffer- 
ings, he was a man nevertheless. In him, as philosophy 
came in to incorporate the first imagination, was the ful- 
ness of humanity as well as the fulness of the Godhead. 
And out of this strange mixture they composed a being 
whose life is without instruction, whose example is still 
nothing, whose trial is but a helpless perplexity. 
The noble image of a man is effaced, is destroyed. 
Instead of a man to love and to follow, we have a man- 
god to worship. From being the example of devotion, he 
is its object; the religion of Christ ended with his 
life, and left us instead but the Christian religion. The 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 99 

afflictions which by an act of his own wil], as being him- 
self the source of all power, he inflicts upon himself 

what afflictions are these ? The trial of humanity, which 
gives dignity to the persevering endurance through life 
for truth's sake, and which gives death its nobleness, is 
the constancy of the mind to good, with uncertainty of the 
issue, when it does but feel its duty, and does not know 
the consequences. The conviction of the martyr that the 
stake is the gate of Paradise, diminishes the dignity of 
the suffering in proportion to its strength. If it be abso- 
lute certainty, the trial is absolutely nothing. And that 
all- wise Being who knew all, who himself willed, erected, 
determined all, what could the worst earthly suffering be 
to him to whom all the gates which close our knowledge 
were shining crystal ? What trial, what difficulty was it 
all to him ? His temptation is a mockery. His patience, 
meekness, humility, it is but trifling with words, unless 
he was a man, and but a man. 

And yet what does it not say on the other side for 
mankind, that the life of one good man, which had 
nothing, nothing but its goodness to recommend it, should 
have struck so deep into the heart of the race that for 
eighteen hundred years they have seen in that life some- 
thing so far above them that they will not claim a 
kindred origin with him who lived it. And while they 
have scarcely bettered in their own practice, yet stand, 
and ever since have stood, self-condemned, in acknowledge 



100 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

ing in spite of themselves that such goodness alone is 
divine. This is their ideal, their highest. 



People canvas up and down the value and utility of 
Christianity, and none of them seem to see that it was the 
common channel towards which all fhe great streams of 
thought in the old world were tending, and that in some 
form or other when they came to unite it must have 
been. That it crystallized round a particular person 
may have been an accident ; but in its essence, as soon as 
the widening intercourse of the nations forced the Jewish 
mind into contact with the Indian and the Persian and 
the Grecian, such a religion was absolutely inevitable. 

It was the development of Judiasm in being the fulfil- 
ment of the sacrificial theory, and the last and purest 
conception of a personal God lying close above the 
world, watching, guiding, directing, interfering. Its 
object was no longer the narrow one of the temporal in- 
terests of a small people. The chrysalis has burst its 
shell, and the presiding care extended to all mankind, 
caring not now for bodies only but for souls. It was the 
development of Parsism in settling finally the vast ques- 
tion of the double principle, the position of the evil 
spirit, his history, and the method of his defeat ; while 
Zoroaster's doctrine of a future state was now for the 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 101 

first time explained and justified; and his invisible 
world of angels and spirits, and the hierarchies of the 
seven heavens were brought into subjection to the same 
one God of the Jews. 

It was the development of the speculative Greek phil- 
osophy of the school of Plato, of the doctrine of the 
Spirit, and the mysterious Trinity, the eV koL Trav, the 
word or intellect becoming active in the primal Being ; 
while, lastly, the Hindoo doctrine of the incarnation is 
the uniting element in which the other three combine, 
and which interpenetrates them with an awful 'majesty 
which singly they had not known. 

So these four streams uniting formed into an enoimous 
system, comprehending all which each was seeking for, 
and bringing it all down home, close to earth, human, 
direct and tangible, and supplying mankind with full 
measure of that spiritual support with which only minds 
most highly disciplined can afford to dispense. 



[These fragments require no comment. They are their 
own. I will but add one more, one which I think really 
remarkable in itself.] 



The source of all superstition is the fear of having 



102 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

offended God, the sense of something within ourselves, 
which we call sin. Sin, in its popular, and therefore 
most substantial sense, means the having done something 
to gratify ourselves, which we knew, or might have 
known, was displeasing to God. It depends, therefore, 
for its essence on the doer having had the power of act- 
ing otherwise than he did. When there is no such 
power there is no sin. Now, let us examine this. In 
reflecting upon our o vn actions we find that they arise 
from the determination of our will, as we call the ulti- 
mate moral principle of action, upon some object. When 
we will, we will something, not nothing. Objects attract 
or repel the will by the appearance of something in 
themselves, either desirable or undesirable. And in 
every action, if analysed, the will is found to have been 
determined by the presence of the greatest degree of 
desirableness on the side towards which it has been 
determined. It is alike self-contradictory and contrary 
to experience, that a man of two goods should choose the 
lesser, knowing it at the time to be the lesser. Observe, 
I say, at the time of action. We are complex, and there- 
fore, in our natural state, inconsistent beings, and the 
opinion of this hour need not be the opinion of the next. 
It may be diflferent before the temptation appear ; it may 
return to be different after the temptation is passed ; the 
nearness or distance of objects may alter their relative 
magnitude, or appetite or passion may obscure the reflect- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 103 

ing power, and give a temporary impulsive force to a 
particular side of our nature. But, uniformly, given a 
particular condition of a man's nature, and given a num- 
ber of possible courses, his action is as necessarily deter- 
mined into the course best corresponding to that condi- 
tion, as a bar of steel suspended between two magnets is 
determined tow^ards the most powerful. It may go 
reluctantly, for it will still feel the attraction of the 
weaker magnet, but it will still obey the strongest, and 
must obey. What we call knowing a man's character is 
knowing how he will act in such and such conditions. 
The better we know him the more surely we can pro- 
phecy. If we know him perfectly we are certain. 

So that it appears that at the stage first removed from 
the action, we cannot find what we called the necessary 
condition of sin. It is not there ; and we must look for 
it a step higher among the causes which determine the 
conditions under which the man acts. Here v.^e find the 
power of motives depends on the character, or the want 
of character. If no character be formed, they will influ- 
ence according to the temporary preponderance of this or 
that part of the nature ; if there be formed character, on 
the conditions, again, which have formed it, on past 
habits, and therefore on past actions. Go back, therefore, 
upon these, and we are again in the same way referred 
higher and still higher, until we arrive at the first condi- 



104 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

tion, the natural powers and faculties with which the 
man has been sent into the world. 

Therefore, while we find such endless differences be- 
tween the actions of different men under the same 
temptations, or of the same men at different times, we 
shall yet be unable to find any link of the chain undeter- 
mined by the action of the outward circumstance on the 
inner law ; or any point where we can say a power lay 
in the individual will of choosing either of two courses — 
in other words, to discover sin. Actions are governed by 
motives. The power of motives depends on character, 
and character on the original faculties and the training 
which they have received from the men or things among 
which they have been bred. 

Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera. 
If you ask me why, then, conscience so imperatively 
declares that it is real ? I answer, conscience declares 
nothing of the kind. We are conscious simply of what 
we do, and what is done to us. The judgment may come 
in to pass sentence ; but the judgment is formed on 
instruction and experience, and may be as wrong in this 
matter as in any other : being trained in the ordinary 
theory of morals, it will and must judge according to it ; 
but it does not follow that it must be right any more 
than if it be trained in a particular theory of politics, 
and judges according to that, it must be right. Men 
obey an appetite under present temptation, to obey 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 105 

which they have before learned will be injurious to them, 
and which, after the indulgence, they again learn has 
been injurious to them ; but which, at the time, they 
either expected would, in their case, remit its natural 
penalty, or else, about which, being blinded by their feel- 
ings, they never thought at all. Looking back on their 
past state of mind, and finding it the same as that to 
which they have returned when the passions have 
ceased to work, it seems to them that they knew better, 
and might have done otherwise. They wish they had. 
The}^ feel they have hurt themselves, and imagine they 
have broken a law. It is true they have broken the 
higher law, but not in the way which they fancy, but by 
obeying the lower law, which at the time was the 
stronger. Our instinct has outrun our theory in this 
matter ; for while w^e insist upon free will and sin, we 
make allowance for individuals who have gone wrong, on 
the very ground of provocation, of temptation, of bad 
education, of infirm character. By and by philosophy 
will follow, and so at last we may hope for a true theory of 
morals. It is curious to watch, in the history of religious 
beliefs, the gradual elimination of this monster of moral 
evil. The first state of mankind is the unreflecting 
state. The nature is undeveloped, looking neither before 
nor after ; it acts on the impulse of the moment, and is 
troubled with no weary retrospect, nor with any notions 
of a remote future which present conduct can affect, and 



106 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

knowing neither good nor evil, better or worse, it does 
simply what it desires, and is happy in it. It is the 
state analogous to the early childhood of each of us, and 
is represented in the common theory of Paradise — the 
state of innocence. 

But men had to grow as we grew. Their passions de- 
veloped rapidly, their minds slowly ; but fast enough to 
allow them in the interval of passion, to reflect upon 
themselves, to generalise, and form experience ; and, 
acquiring this rudimental notions of laws from observing 
the tendency of actions, men went through what is called 
the Fall; and obtained that knowledge of good and evil 
which Schiller calls " ein Riesen Schritt der Menscheit." 
Feeling instinctively that the laws under which they 
were, were not made by themselves, but that a power was 
round and over them greater than themselves, they 
formed the notion of a lawgiver, whom they conceived 
they could please by obedience to the best they knew, 
and make angry by following the worse. It is an old 
remark, that as men are, such they paint. their gods ; and 
as in themselves the passionate, or demonic nature, long 
preponderated, so the gods they worshipped were demons 
like themselves, jealous, capricious, exacting, revengeful 
the figures which fill the old mythologies, and appear 
partly in the Old Testament. They feared them as they 
feared the powerful of their own race, and sought to pro- 
pitiate them by similar offerings and services. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH, 107 

Go on, and now we find ourselves on a third stage ; but 
now fast rising into a clearing atmosphere. The absolute 
worth of goodness is seen as distinct from power ; such 
beings as these demon gods could not be the highest 
beings. Good and evil could not coexist in one Supreme; 
absolutely different in nature they could not have a 
common origin ; the moral world is bipolar, and we have 
dualism, the two principles, coeternalj coequal. 

By and by, again, the horizon widens. The ultimate 
identity of might and right glimmers out fully in the 
Zenda Vesta as the stars come out above the mountains 
when we climb out of the mist of the valleys. The evil 
Spirit is no longer the absolute independent Ahriman ; 
but Ahriman and Ormuzd are but each a dependent 
spirit; and an awful formless, boundless figure, the 
eternal, the illimitable, looms out from the abyss behind 
them^ presently to degrade still farther the falling 
Ahriman into a mere permitted Satan, finally to be de- 
stroyed. 

Such a position could not long continue : after two 
hundred years of vague efibrts after Pantheism, which 
would have leapt the chasm, not bridged it, out came 
the great doctrine of the atonement, the final defeat of 
the power of sin ; the last stage before the dissolution of 
the idea. 

Finally rises philosophy, which after a few monstrous 
efforts from Calvin to Leibnitz to reconcile contradictions 



108 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

and form a theodice, comes out boldly in Spinozism to de- 
clare the impossibility of the existence of a power antag- 
onistic to God; and defining the perfection of man's 
nature, as the condition under which it has fullest action 
and freest enjoyments of all its powers, sets this as a 
moral ideal before us, toward which we shall train our 
moral efforts as the artist trains his artistic efforts to- 
wards his ideal. The success is various, as the faculties 
and conditions which God has given are various ; but the 
spectre which haunted the conscience is gone. Our 
failures are errors, not crimes — nature's discipline with 
which God teaches us ; and as little violations of his law> 
or rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early 
blunders, or even ultimate and entire failures, are laying 
store of guilt on him. 



It could not last with Markham, this philosophising, I 
knew it could not. It was but the working off in a sort 
of moral fermentation of the strong corruption with 
which his mind had become impregnated. Markham's 
heart had more in it than blood, and his nature was 
either too weak or else too genuine to find his cravings 
satisfied, when he had resolved the great life of humanity, 
these six thousand years of man's long wrestle with the 
angel of destiny, into a cold system in ^hich he could 
calculate the ebb and flow as on the tables of a tide. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 109 

Doubtless, some such way of reading it there is ; but woe 
to him to whom it is given to read it so ; more than man 
ever was, he must be, or far less, not such a one at any 
rate as poor Markham. The spell broke ; one day I 
had a letter from him of the old sort, of which his heart, 
not his head, had had the making. He was unwell, and 
the philosophising spirit which had possessed him, think- 
ing a failing tenement no longer worth its occupying, had 
flung it off again to its old owner. Whether it was that 
the unclean thing was but making a brief absence for 
some process of sweeping and garnishing to take place 
against a fuller possession, whatever it was, it was gone ; 
and he himself, for the better comforting of soul and 
body, was going off to spend a winter at Como. He was 
going alone ; one of his sisters offered to accompany him, 
but it was an offer of duty rather than affection ; and as 
those very dutiful people are so punctiliously scrupulous 
in keeping both sides of the equation equal, and as, poor 
fellow, he felt he would have to pay for what he received 
on one side by a yet further reduction of the little stock 
he had remaining upon the other, he thought it would be 
better for himself, for her and all of them, to hold him- 
self under his own keeping and trouble them no further. 
He was not ill enough to be alarmed or to alarm us ; . . . 
so only the seven devils were kept away, which seemed 
the only danger. 

Well, Markham went. Over the few centre pages oi 



110 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

his life, while this fermenting was at its w^orst, we have 
till now been turning ; what follows will complete it 
from its beginning, and we shall see what he was before, 
and whither, by and by, he was determined. Scepticism, 
like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the 
brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its 
growth, unless we track its seed to the power which 
sowed it. Among other matters with which he enter- 
tained himself in this Italian winter was a retrospective 
sketch, which to me, as I read it, appeared of a value 
quite unspeakable as an analysis of a process through 
which in these last years so many minds besides his own 
have been slowly and silently devolving. I had intended 
to mutilate it, but that each page pleaded with so much 
earnestness to be the one that I was to choose, that I 
could only satisfy all by taking all. It is not long, it 
was broken ofi' abruptly, we shall see by and by 
how broken ; but it is carried down to a point, when we 
can link it on with no too serious aposiopesis to those 
first letters which have already caused in us feelings 
which I will not endeavor to analyse, lest I find in 
myself more sympathy with them, than I wish to think 
I feel. 



THE NEMESIS OF FATTH.. Ill 



CONFESSIONS OF A SCEPTIC. 



THAT there is something very odd about this life of 
ours, that it is a kind of Egyptian bondage, where 
a daily tale of bricks must be given in, yet where we 
have no straw given us wherewith to burn them, is a 
very old confession indeed. ' We cry for something we 
cannot find ; we cannot satify ourselves with what we 
do find, and there is more than cant in that yearning 
after a better land of promise, as all men know when 
they are once driven in upon themselves and compelled 
to be serious. Every pleasure palls, every employment 
possible for us is in the end vanity and disappointment — 
the highest employment most of all. We start with 
enthusiasm — out we go each of us to our task in all the 
brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses ; 
we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, 
and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are con- 
cerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless 
unprofitableness of labor most when we have most 
succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down 
our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching 



112 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a 
dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of 
ourselves — too much, for we feel that we are better than 
we can accomplish ; too little, for, if we have done any 
good at all, it has been as we were servants of a system 
too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through 
life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting 
ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so 
long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can 
struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when 
the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face 
with us ; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too 
soon, as if the strange master-worker has no longer any , 
work to offer us, and turns us off to idleness and to our- u 
selves ; in the silence then our hearts lift up their voices 
and cry out they can find no rest here, no home* Neither 
pleasure, nor rank, nor money, nor success in life, as it 
is called, have satisfied or can satisfy; and either earth 
has nothing at all which answers to our cravings, or els 
it is something different from all these, which we have 
missed finding — this peace which passes understanding 
— and from which in the hey-day of hope we had 
turned away, as lacking the meretricious charm which 
then seemed most alluring. 

I am not sermonizing of Religion, or of God, or of 
Heaven, at least not directly. These are often but the 
catchwords on the lips of the vulgarly disappointed ; 



Lt ^ 



i 



xA 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 113 

which, like Plato's Cephalus, they grasp at as earthly 
pleasures glide out of their hands ; not from any genuine 
heart or love for them, but because they are words w hich 
seem to have a meaning — shadows which fill up the 
blank when all else is gone away. But there is one 
strong direction into which the needle of our being, 
when left to itself, is for ever determined, which is more 
than a catchword, which in the falsest heart of all 
remains still desperately genuine, the one last reality of 
which universal instinct is assured. 

When my eyes wander down the marble pages on the 
walls of the church aisles, or w^hen I stray among the 
moss-grown stones lying there in their long grassy 
couches in the churchyard, and spell out upon them the 
groupings of the fast crumbling names, there I find the 
talisman. It is home. Far round the earth as their life 
callings may have scattered men here is their treasure, 
for here their heart has been. They have gone away to 
live ; they come home to die, to lay their dust in their 
fathers' sepulchre, and resign their consiousness in the 
same spot where first it broke into being. Whether it be 
that here are their first dearest recollections of innocent 
happiness ; whether the same fair group which once 
laughed around the old fireside would gather in together • 
and tie up again the broken links in the long home 
where they shall never part again ; whether there be some 
strange instinct which compels all men back to the scene 



i.. 




114 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

of their birth, to lay their bodies down in the same 
church which first received them, and where they 
muttered their first prayer ; whatever be the cause — like 
those cunning Indian weapons which, projected from the 
hand, fly up their long arc into the air, yet when their 
force is spent glide back to the spot from which they 
were flung — the spent life travellers carry back their 
bodies to the old starting point of home. 

The fish struggle back to their native rivers ; the 
passage birds to the old woods where they made their 
first adventure on the wings which since have borne 
them aiound the world. The dying eagle drags his 
feeble flight to his own eyrie, and men toil-worn and 
care-worn, gather back from town and city, from battle- 
field or commerce mart, and fiing ofi* the load where they 
first began to bear it. Home — yes, home is the one 
perfectly pure earthly instinct which we have. We call 
heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it. 
So strong is this craving in us, that, when cross fortune 
has condemned the- body to a distant resting-place, yet 
the name is written on the cenotaph in the old place, as 
if only choosing to be remembered in the scene of its 
own most dear remembrance. Oh, most touching are 
these monuments ! Sermons more eloquent were never 
heard inside the church walls than may be read there. 
Whether those hopes, written there so confidently, of 
after risings and blessed meetings beyond the grave, are 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. II5 

any more than the "perhaps" with which we try to 
lighten up its gloom, and they be indeed that waking for 
which they are waiting there so silently, or whether 
these few years be the whole they are compelled to bear 
of personal existence, and all which once was is reborn 
again in other forms which are not there any more, still 
are those marble stones the most touching witness of the 
human heart, the life in death protesting against the life 
which was lived. 

Nor, I think, shall we long wonder or have far to look 

for the causes of so wide a feeling, if we turn from the 

death side to the life side, and see what it has been to us 

even in the middle of the very business itself of living. 

For as it is in this atmosphere that all our sweetest, 

because most innocent child memories are embosomed, so 

. all our life along, when the world but knows us as men 

of pleasure or men of business, when externally we seem 

to have taken our places in professions, and are no longer 

single beings, but integral parts of the large social being ; 

at home, when we come home, we lay aside our mask 

and drop our tools, and are no longer lawyers, sailors, 

soldiers,, statesmen, clergymen, but only men. We fall 

again into our most human relations, which, after all, are 

the whole of what belongs to us as we are ourselves, 'and 

alone have the key-note of our hearts. There our skill, 

If skill we have, is exercised with real gladness on home' 

subjects. We are witty if it be so, not for applause but 



116 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

for affection. We paint our fathers' or our sisters' faces, 
if so lies our gift, because we love them ; the mechanic's 
genius comes out in playthings for the little brothers* 
and we cease the struggle in the race of the world, and 
give our hearts leave and leisure to love. No wonder 
the scene and all about it is so dear to us. How beauti- 
ful to turn back the life page to those old winter fire- 
sides, when the apple hoards were opened, and the best 
old wine came up out of its sawdust, and the boys came 
back from school to tell long stories of their fagging 
labours in the brief month of so dear respite, and still 
longer of the day's adventures and the hair-breadth 
escapes of larks and blackbirds. The merry laugh at the 
evening game ; the admiring wonder of the young chil- 
dren woke up from their first sleep to see their elder 
sisters dressed out in smiles and splendor for the ball at 
the next town. It may seem strange to say things like 
these have any character of religion ; and yet I some- 
times think they are themselves religion itself, form^ing, 
as they do, the'Very integral groups in such among our 
life pictures as have been painted in with colors of real 
purity. Even of the very things which we most search 
for in the business of life, we must go back to home to 
find the healthiest types. The loudest shouts of the 
world's applause gives us but a faint shadow of the pride 
we drew from fathers' and sisters' smiles, when we came 
back with our first school prize at the first holidays. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 117 

The wildest pleasures of after-life are nothing like so 
sweet as the old game, the old dance, old Christmas, 
with its mummers and its mistletoe, and the kitchen 
saturnalia. Nay, perhaps, even the cloistered saint, who 
is drawing a long life of penitential austerity to a close, 
and through the crystal gates of death is gazing already 
on the meadows of Paradise, may look back with 
awe at the feeling which even now he cannot imitate, 
over his first prayer at his mother's side in the old church 
at home. 

Yes, there we all turn our eyes at last ; the world's 
glitter for a time blinds us ; but with the first serious 
thought the old notes come echoing back again. It is as 
if God, knowing the weary temptation, the hollow 
emptiness of the life which yet we needs must lead, had 
ordained our first years for the laying in an unconscious 
stock of sweet and blessed thoughts to feed us along our 
way. We talk much of the religious discipline of our 
schools, and moral training and mind developing, and 
what more we will of the words without meaning, the 
hollow verbiage of our written and spoken thoughts 
about ourselves ; yet I question whether the home of 
childhood has not more to do with religion than all the 
teachers and the teaching, and the huge unfathomed 
folios. Look back and think of it, and we cannot 
separate the life we lived from our religion, nor our 
religion from our life. They wind in and in together, 



118 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

the gold and silver threads interlacing through the warp ; 
and the whole forms together then in one fair image of 
what after-life might and ought to be, and what it never 
is. No idle, careless, thoughtless man, so long as he per- 
sists in being what he is, can endure the thought of home 
any more than he can endure the thought of God. At 
his first return to himself, it is the first thought which 
God sends .... well for him if it be not too late. 
If we could read the diary of suicide, and trace the 
struggles of the bleeding heart, in suspense yet between 
the desire and its execution, yet drawing nearer and ever 
nearer, and gazing with more fixed intensity on the 
grave as the end of its sorrow, ah, will not the one fair 
thought then on which it will last rest be the green 
memories of home ! The last deep warning note either 
filling up and finishing the measure of despair with its 
maddening loveliness, or else, if there be one spot not 
utterly wasted and destroyed where life and love can yet 
take root and grow, once more to quicken there, and win 
back for earth its child again. 

The world had its Golden Age — its Paradise — and 
religion, which is the world's heart, clings to its memory. 
Beautiful it lies there — on the far horizon of the past — 
the sunset which shall, by and by, be the sunrise of 
Heaven. Yes, and God has given us each our own 
Paradise, our own old childhood, over which the old 
glories linger — to which our own hearts cling, as all we 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. lid 

have ever known of Heaven upon earth 

And there, as all earth's weary wayfarers turn back their 
toil-jaded eyes, so do the poor speculators, one of whom 
is this writer, whose thoughts have gone astray, who has 
been sent out like the raven from the window of the 
ark, and flown to and fro over the ocean of speculation, 
finding no place for his soul to rest, no pause for his 
aching wings, turn back in thought, at least, to that old 
time of peace — that village church — that child-faith — 
which, once lost, is never gained again — strange mystery 
— is never gained again — with sad and weary longing ! 
Ah ! you who look with cold eyes on such a one, and lift 
them up to Heaven, and thank God you are not such as 
he, — and call him hard names, and think of him as one who 
is forsaking a cross, and pursuing unlawful indulgence, 
and deserving all good men's reproach ! Ah ! could you see 
down below his heart's surface, could you count the tears 
streaming down his cheeks, as out through some church- 
door into the street come pealing the old familiar notes, 
and the old psalms which he cannot sing, the chaunted 
creed which is no longer his creed, and yet to part with 
which was worse agony than to lose his dearest friend ; 
ah ! you would deal him lighter measure. What, is not 
his cup bitter enough, but that all the good, whose kind- 
ness at least, whose sympathy and sorrow, whose prayers 
he might have hoped for, that these must turn away 
from him, as from an offence, as from a thing forbid ? — 



120 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

that he must tread the wine-press alone, calling no God- 
fearing man his friend ; and this, too, with the sure 
knowledge that coldness, least of all, he is deserving, for 
God knows it is no pleasant task which has been laid 
upon him ! Well, be it so. You cannot take my heart 
from me. You cannot take away my memory. I will 
not say, would to God you could, although it is through 
these that I am wounded, and, if these nerves were 
killed, I should know pain no longer. No, cost me what 
it will, I will struggle back, and reproduce for myself 
those old scenes where then I lived — that old faith 
which, then, alas ! I could believe — which made all 
my happiness, so long as any happiness was possible 
to me. 



You will never have perfect men, Plato says, till you 
have perfect circumstances. Perhaps a true saying ! — but, 
till the philosopher is born who can tell us what circum- 
stances are perfect, a sufficiently speculative one. At 
any rate, one finds strange enough results — often the 
very best — coming up out of conditions the most 
unpromising. Such a bundle of odd contradictions we 
human beings are, that perhaps full as many repellent as 
attracting influences are acquired, before we can give our 
hearts to what is right. Yet, as a whole, my own child- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 121 

hood found as much favor as any one can fairly hope 
for ; and, as I look back, I can see few things which I 
could wish had been otherwise. I say this, neither in 
shame for what I am not, nor as refusing credit for what 
I am. I am concerned only with the facts — what I was, 
and what has resulted out of me. We were a religious 
family — I mean a sober, serious family — not enthusiasti- 
cally devotional — very little good comes to children from 
over-passionate straining in this matter. Grown men, 
who have sinned, and who have known their sin, whose 
hearts have shed themselves in tears of blood, who can feel 
the fulness of the language of religion from their own ex- 
perience of their failings and their helplessness, and have 
heard the voice of God speaking to them in their despair, 
they may be enthusiastic if they will — pour themselves 
out in long prayers, and hymns, and psalms, and have 
His name for ever on their lips — they may, because it 
will be real with them. But it is not so with child- 
ren ; their 3"oung bright spirits know little yet of the 
burden of life which is over them. They have hardly 
yet sinned — far less awakened out of sin — and it is ill 
wisdom, even if it be possible, to train their conscience 
into precocious sensitiveness. Long devotions are a 
weariness to healthy children. If, unhappily, they have 
been made unhealthy — if they have been taught to look 
into themselves, and made to imagine themselves misera- 
ble and fallen, and every moment exciting God's anger. 



122 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

and so need these long devotions — their premature 
sensibility will exhaust itself over comparative trifles; 
and, by and by, when the real occasion comes, they Will 
find that, like people who talk of common things in 
superlatives, their imagination will have wasted what 
will then be really needed. Their present state will 
explain to themselves the unreality of their former 
state ; but the heart will have used out its pov/er, and 
thoughts, which have been made unreal, by an unreal 
use of them, will be unreal still, and for ever. This was 
not our case. We, happily, were never catechised about 
our feelings ; and so our feelings, slight as they were, 
were always genuine. Religion, with us, was to do our 
duty ; that is, to say our lessons every day ; to say our 
prayers morning and evening ; to give up as many as 
we could of our own wishes for one another ; and to 
earn good marks, which, though but slips of blue paper, 
were found, at the end of the month, to be good current 
paper of sterling value, and convertible into sixpences, 
which we stored up to make presents to our kind gover- 
ness, and kinder aunt. Our own little prayers we said 
always by ourselves, at our bedside ; the Lord's Prayer 
out loud, and small extempore ones, which we kept under 
a whisper, because they were commonly small interces- 
sions for some dear friends; which we shrunk from 
letting those friends hear ; for fear they might be 
grateful to us, and that \7ould be stealing so much of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 123 

our pleasure in ourselves. Then, besides these, we had 
family prayers in the school-room, which were far from 
being so pleasant or so easy to attend to. They were 
read out of a book by the governess, and we did not 
know them ; they were in long words which we did not 
understand ; I always counted them among the unplea- 
sant duties, and I longed for them to be over. Two long 
words particularly, that came in the middle, I used to 
watch for, as I knew then that half the time was past. 
If I had been asked whether I did not know that this was 
very disrespectful, and that I ought to have had the 
same reverence in the school-room as in the silence of my 
own sleeping place, I suppose I should have answered 
quite satisfactorily; but I should not have answered 
truly. Whatever may be the case with men, children, 
at any rate, only feel ; they do not know ; I did not feel 
the same, and that was enough. I had said what I 
wanted ; this was a form which I might respect gen- 
erally, but could not enter into. Well, and after that 
came the Psalms and chapters. The Psalms we used to 
read verse and verse ; and here again I was very imper- 
fectly what I ought to have been. I could make nothing 
of them read in this way; I could not understand how 
anybody could ; and very early then, I made an observa- 
tion which I have never seen reason to alter, that 
nothing short of special interference with miracle will 
enable any heads ever to understand them, into which 



124 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

they have been beaten in the popular English fashion. 
I got a general reverence for them, as for the rest of the 
service, because they were treated reverentially by those 
I reverenced ; but, for anything they taught me, they 
might have been kept in the old Hebrew : far better, 
indeed, as I should not then, as I do now, have known 
them all by heart, finding still their meaning sealed to 
me under the trodden familiarity of sound. To this 
day I can make nothing of the Psalms, except when I 
see a verse or two quoted, and the meaning so held out 
before me, or else when I read them in a less familiar 
language. Yet even so they will translate into the 
old jingle, and the evil reproduces itself. It fared 
no better with the Prophecies and Epistles. But all 
this was compensated by the stories in the Old and New 
Testament, which were the most intense delight to me. 
With a kind of half-fear I was doing something wrong, 
I used to transform my person into those I read about. 
I was Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Joseph I liked best of all; 
I believe because he had such a pretty coat, and because 
he was good and ill-treated. Benjamin never took my 
fancy ; everything went too well with him. I was 
always sorry at leaving off at the ends of chapters ; I 
should have liked better to have had the stories com- 
plete ; but I believed it was all right ; that there was 
virtue in verses and chapters, as in everything else in the 
Bible. Whatever I may think at present of all this, and 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 125 

of the good and ill effects on the whole of our mechani- 
cal treatment of the Bible ; still, I am sure that it is in 
this early unreasoning reverence that the secret lies of 
our all believing it as we do ; and that it is here, and not 
in authenticities, and evidences, and miracles, and pro- 
phecy fulfilments, that our faith is rooted. We start on 
our reasonings with foregone conclusions ; and well for 
us that we do so, or they would lead us certainly a very 
different road. 

Well, so went on our lives. The horizon of our little 
home valley was not very wide ; and our moral horizon 
was no wider ; yet inside them lay all our world. We 
visited little; and what company came was always 
company ; not nice pleasant friends, but a set of alien 
beings, only inade to be looked at when we came in to 
dessert, and hardly known to be our fellow-creatures. 
They might have come from the stars for all we cared ; 
and they took notice of us in ways we did not ]ike in 
the least. The people of the village, our own family, 
and the servants, were all w^e recognised as people. They 
were the inhabitants of our own w^orld. In the school- 
room lay otr duties ; outside, in the garden, or in the 
copses beyond, where the brook ran and the violets 
grew, was our pleasure place, while round it all lay the 
great w^ood with its dark trees and gloomy underpaths, 
into which we gazed with a kind of awful horror, as the 
ghost and robber and fairy-haunted edge of the world 



126 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Avhich closed it in. We were like an old camp in the 
Vr'ilderness, on some Arabian oasis, in which we lived as 
the old patriarchs lived. , We had our father, our mother, 
brothers, sisters ; and the old faces of the old servants, 
and the sheep and the cows in the meadow, and the birds 
upon the trees, and the poultry in the bushes, and the 
sky, and God who lived in it ; and that was all. And 
what a beautiful all ! My delight, in the long summer 
afternoons, was to lie stretched out upon the grass, 
watching the thin white clouds floating up so high there 
in the deep sether, and wondering how far it was from 
their edge up to the blue, where God was. 

I have often thought it is part of the inner system of 
this earth that each one of us should repeat over again 
in his own experience the spiritual condition of each of 
its antecedent eras ; and surely we at home in this way 
repeated over again the old patriarchal era in all its 
richness. Here were we in our little earth. There above 
was our Father in heaven — not so far away. He heard 
us when we prayed to Him — His eyes were ever upon 
us — He called us His children — He loved us and cared 
for us. The imagination is too true to discriminate great 
distances of time. God had been down on this earth of 
ours, and talked to the patriarchs and to Mose^. They 
were very old ; but then papa was very old too, and I 
used to look at his silver hair, and wonder whether he 
had ever seen Abraham — whether he perhaps had seen 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 127 

God. Nay, once I remember, in an odd conf usiofl of the 
name of father, the thought crossing me that he might 
be something very high indeed. 

Well, to such children as we were, Sunday was a very 
intense delight. First of all, there were no lessons ; then 
we had our best clothes ; we had no employment which 
we liked, that Sunday interfered with. We might not 
dig in the gardens ; but we did not complain of that if 
we might still look at the flowers and smell them. 
Everything was at rest about us. The school-room was 
shut up. The family dined between churches, so that 
that day we were admitted to the parlor, and going to 
church was delightful. The day was God's own particu- 
lar day, and church was Gods own house. He was 
really there, we were told, though I rather wondered we 
did not see Him ; and to go there was the happiest thing 
we knew. I thouo^ht the services rather long;, and I did 
not much understand them ; but I always liked all except 
the sermon. I liked evening service best because it v/as 
shorter ; but I remember thinking it was not wisely 
shortened : and I would gladly have compounded to take 
back litany and communion to get off* sermon. It was 
long words again, and I felt towards it much as I did to 
school-room prayers. As Goethe says of Gretchen, when 
we were at church it was — 

" Halb Kinderspiel halb Gott im Herzen." 

Yet we loved God in our child's fashion, and it was 



I 



128 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

the more delightful that neither feeling absorbed us. 
The singing was very pleasant ; but best of all it was 
when a poor, too-curious robin had strayed into the 
aisles, and went wandering in alarmed perplexity up and 
down among the long arches, beating its little beak 
against the window glass, or alighting on the shoulder of 
one of the little painted cherubims, with its shrill note 
lending a momentary voice to the stone harp which hung 
stringless in those angel fingers. After church we said 
our catechism, at which I was always best able to answer 
my duty towards my neighbor ; but neither I nor my 
sister, who said it with me, could ever make much of our 
duty towards God. We had our own feelings, which this 
somehow interfered with ; it was not in easy enough 
language, and, as we knew the routine of it very toler- 
ably, we took turns to begin, that we might escape. Yet 
there was always this compensation, that whichever got 
off that had the two long answers. But best of all we 
the Sunday evenings— alas, how unlike our experienc 
later Sunday evenings— for one of two delights 

always sure to me ; either dear Miss H read me t. 

Fairy Queen, Avhich then was only second to the Bibl 
with me, or else the older ones of the party would play 
with us young ones at animal, vegetable and mineral— 
that first intrusion of philosophy into the holy place, which 
by and by would play work there we little enough dream- 
ed of then. Infinite was the glee with which we strained 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 129 

our memory for the oddest stories, and the oddest things 
in them, to be hunted down the scent which the ques- 
tions drew from us. The head of the floating axe was a 
great favorite ; so was Jael's nail ; or, harder still, the 
lordly dish in which the butter was presented. Kind 
elder ones, as then we thought, to trifle so with us ; but 
my since experience of Sunday evenings in England has 
taught me that they were not so altogether losers, and I 
would gladly, as I grew up, have exchanged my devout 
sermon readings for the smallest game with the smallest 
child. Unhappily we fell, after a time, under another 
regime ; we lost our games ; my Fairy Queen, too, was 
sent to sleep upon her shelf; a profane poet was thought un- 
fit for Sunday's serious perusing. In truth the allegory was 
not thouo'ht much of ; Una was a fair damsel in distress — 
the lion a real, good, grand, noble lion, such as we saw at 
the menagerie ; how I hated that Sansfoy for killing him. 
m tempted to say here how serious a mistake we grown 
^estants make with these modern Sundays of ours. I 
-ifter taught no book not strictly religious might be 
,j.. Sermons ! who can go on reading sermons ? I was 
.fled naughty if I went to sleep; and, at that time, 
" Wharton's Deathbed Scenes " was the only book in our 
library which sweetened the dull medicine with a story* 
I learnt these by heart, and then I was destitute ; and 
my only comfort in thinking that heaven was all Sunday 



130 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

was the hope that at least there would be no long winter 
evenings there. 

Grown people coquet with their consciences so ridicu- 
lously in this matter. They will talk and think all day 
of the foolishest of follies ; young ladies will wear their 
best bonnets, thinking only how pretty they look in 
them : but to read a book of foolishness, or to act out 
the gay dress into a pleasure party, is sin. Some people 
will read letters, but not write them ; but generally both 
are permitted, as well as newspapers. A magazine 
is a debateable point — questionable ; though many 
degrees better than a book. A book, if you will 
have a book, must be a volume of sermons ; or, at least, 
of commentaries. But to return to my healthy young 
Sundays ; they were all bright. It seemed as if on 
Sunday it never rained ; and one way or another, at 
least at home, it has never lost its calm, quiet beauty. 
The flowers wear a less business-like color ; the fields 
catch the color of our spirits, and seem to lie 
in obedient repose. I cannot think the cattle 
do not feel it is not as other days ; the lambs have a 
kind of going to church frisk about them ; your dog, on 
every other daj^ your faithfullest of companions, lies out 
before the hall-door, and never thinks of following you 
till after evening service ; and your horse, if you 
have him out in the morning, looks a sermon full 
of puritan reproaches at you. The sacredness of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 131 

Sunday is stamped on the soil of England, and in the 
heart of every Englishman ; and all this by the old 
Sundays we remember of the first ten years of our 
lives. 

So it was that, without any notion of the mystery of 
Christianity, I grew up in the intensest reverence for it ; 
the more intense because I had no notion of its meaning. 
I cannot say what the Bible was not to me. I remember 
once in a fit of passionate bravado, when I was required 
to do something I did not like, saying " I swear I will 
not." I meant nothing except a great expression of my 
resolution. My sister told me I had taken God's name in 
vain ; and my conscience burnt in what I had done upon 
my heart as if with a branding iron, and there lies its 
memory — unefFaced and ineffaceable. 

Alas, alas, for the change ! as I write, I seem for a 
moment to feel the old pulsations: but it is all gone 
away — gone like a dream in the moruing — gone with the 
fairy-peopled world where then I thought we had our 
dwelling. " The things that I have felt, I now can feel 
no more ;" when God gave them to me I felt them. He 
gave them — he has taken them away. The child is not 
as the man, and heaven lies all round our lives ; in our 
young years we gambol upon its shores, and gather 
images from the shapes of light that sparkle there : 
and those light beings hover round us in our after 
wanderings, to hold our souls true in faith : that as the 



132 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

child was so in the end the man may be ; and better far 
than that. 

I am not going to trouble further the old vexed ques- 
tion of home and school education ; but as I have been 
speaking of the religious sensibilities ^ hich form them- 
selves at home, and as I have found that home 
and the thoughts connected with it are the elements out 
of which these are wrought, and the food upon which they 
feed ; so I am sure that these sensibilities are the strongest 
among those who I'emain longest in this home nursery 
garden, and, whatever may become of the others, their 
roots at least will nev^r strike in a foreign soil. Charac- 
ter, vigor, independence, these may best form when 
there is most occasion for independent action, and the 
boy thrown upon himself in the hard world atmosphere 
of school, having to make his way and push himself and 
take his own position, will be better formed by far, 
perhaps, to elbow along in after-life by practice of 
elbowing among schoolboys. And, till we know some- 
thing (at present we know nothing at all) of the form 
after which it is most God's will man should most shape 
himself, it is idle to lay down laws for the best way of 
forming him. . Here I am concerned with religious sensi- 
bility, which unquestionably is weakened in every school 
as it is in the world. It leads to no results does religion, 
in the first any more than in the last ; the forms of 
religion may be kept up, the outside praying and the 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 133 

chapel going, some instruction too for decency's sake ; 
Greek Testament classes, article classes and such like. 
But I will appeal to every boy's experience, whether 
^ill this has anything to do with his real religion, or 
whether it looks to much advantage by the side of the 
prayer-book his mother gave him, or the Bible his sisters 
subscribed to buy for him. I will ask him whether the 
tenderest form in which his divinity is taught at school, 
has not seemed to him worldly and irreverent ; whether 
there, it is not lessons, business, discipline— not love, 
heart and pleasure; and whether passing from the school 
Sunday to the first Sunday at home in holidays 
has not been passing from earth into heaven. The 
older we grow, the more surely we each feel our 
own sincere experience to be the type of all sincere 
experience, and I make my appeal without any fear at 
all The same feelings, if I know any- 
thing of human nature, we shall all recognise ; the same 
voice in which God has spoken to our hearts. Once for 
all, religion cannot be taught to boys. Not till the man 
is formed, not till the mind has been drawn out of itself 
and forced to read with its own eyes and not with the 
eyes of books, the world and the men that move and live 
in it ; not till the strangeness of their own nature has 
broken upon them, till they have looked fairly at this 
strange scene on earth here, '' this huge stage," and all 
its shows on '' which the stars with silent influence are 



134 . THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

commenting," not till they have felt the meaning of 
history, have come to feel that in very deed the actions 
of which they read, the books in which they read them, 
were done and made by beings in all points like them- 
selves — in the same trials, mysteries and temptations — 
not till then can religion in its awfulness come out 
before men's minds as a thing to be thought of ; not till 
the question is asked will reason accept the answer. It is 
the last, not the first, scene of education. It cannot, try 
how you will, it cannot come before; till then it can be but 
a feeling — and so with this writer ; God knows whether 
all his teaching weakened his feeling ; it certainly could 
not deepen it — yet at any rate, ill obeyed as it was, the 
old faith he had learnt to love still held its place next 
his heart, till the time came for the change when the 
reason must assume its own respoasibilities. I will step 
lightly over this period, long as it was ; I had been 
trained in rigid Protestantism — Faber on the Prophecies, 
Southey's Book of the Church, had been the pet books 
into which I had been directed. The Devil was at the 
bottom, and the Pope, the unquestionable Antichrist, 
very near him ; and if possible an improvement on his 
ugliness. And the fulfilment, the exact fulfilment, of the 
prophecies, in the matter, for example, of the scarlet 
robe, the forbidding to marry, and the meat fasting, had 
always struck me, not as proofs of the truth of Chris- 
tianity — Heaven knows I never thought of that- — but as 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 135 

the most wonderful instances of the exactness with 
which the courses of the world were marked out for it. 

So I was at about sixteen. Young hoys take what 
they are told with readiest acquiesence, and difficulties 
are easily put away by a healthy mind as temptations 
of the devil. Cruelties said to have been committed by 
God's order in the Old Testament never struck me as 
cruelties ; I glided on without notice over the~nias^cres 
of women and children, much as good sensible people 
nowadays slide over the sufferings of ''the masses;" 
condensing them into the one short word, and dismissing 
them as briefly as the lips dismiss the sound. ..... 

If misgivings ever for a moment arose, I had bu^t to 
remember they were idolaters ; and what was too bad 
for a people so wicked as to be that ? I remember 
thinking it odd that I should be taught to admire Hector, 
and ^neas, and Ulysses, and so many of them, when all 
they were idolaters too. What had we to do with the 
wisdom of Cicero, when he was as great a sinner, as 
these Canaanites ? But I readily laid the blame on the 
defects of my own understanding, I was sure it was all 
right ; and, though I read Hume and Gibbon, I hated 
them cordially, only doubting whether they were greater 

fools or greater knaves Why an all-knowing 

God, too, should require us to pray to Him, should 
threaten to punish us if we did not, when He knew 
what we wanted better than we knew ourselves ; why 



136 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

we should put our wishes into words when we even felt 
ourselves how imperfectly words expressed our feelings, 
and He could know them without ; nay, more, why, 
when as I began to be taught we could not pray without 
He gave us Himself the wish to pray, and the words to 
pray in, He yet should be angry with us when we did 
not do it, when He had not made us wish — this, too, 
seemed very odd to me, .... but 1 dismissed it all as 
it came, as my own fault, and most likely as very 
wrong. 

Just as I was leaving off being a boy, we fell 
under a strong Catholicising influence at home, and I 
used to hear things which were strange enough to ray 
ear. Faber was put away out of my studies ; Newton 
was forbidden ; and Davison, that I thought so 
dry and dull, put in his place. Transubstantiation 
was talked of before me as more than possible ; 
celibacy of the clergy and fasting on the fast days 
were not only not wrong, but the very thing most 

needful our own dinners indeed did not 

suffer diminution but even to raise the 

question was sufficiently alarming, and I sat by in silence, 
listening with the strangest sensations. The martyrdom 
of Cranmer had always been a great favorite with me ; 
the miracle of the unconsumed heart was a real miracle ; 
at least I had been told so. The fulfilled prophecies 
about the Pope were real Scripture prophecies, of which 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 137 

I thought the verification ahiiost terribly exact; and, 
what was worse, the interpretation was made sacred to 
me by early association .... and how to nnlearn 
all this ? T believe I may date from this point the first 
disturbance my mind experienced, and, however long I 
went on laying the blame upon myself, I never recovered 
it. I said to myself , if this miracle was not a miracle, 
how do I know there ever were miracles ? This was 
easily answered, because one sort were in Scripture and 
the other only in Southey's book. But as to fulfilment 
of prophecy, if this was not fulfilment, then what was ? 
we could never be sure of any of it. Davison was no 
help ; for his double sense was the wrong sort of double 
— double-minded. I went to the New Testament for old 
prophecies fulfilled there, and I was still more bewildered ; 
for, in no one case that I could find, would it have been 
possible to conceive without the interpretation that there 
had been any prophecy at all intended. So I was forced 
altogether to give up prophecy till more inspiration came 

to explain it for us 

Alas ! how little we understand the strange mystery of 
the heart. Thoughts com.e and go — float across our 
minds like the cloud shadows on a sunny day ; the sun 
follows out, and no track is seen upon the earth when 
they have passed — all is bright as before. But the heart 
lies out under the breath of Providence like the prepared 
mirror of the photogenic draughtsman ; the figure falls 



138 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

there, it rests but a few moments, and then passes away, 
and no line is seen ; but the rays have eaten in and left a 
form which can never be effaced. . . , . . By and 
by the acid touches it, and there lies the image, full and 
faithful as the hand could paint it. The first doubt of 
the affection of one who is dear to us, how angrily we 
spurn it from us, how we despise and hate ourselves for 
entertaining a thought so detestable ; one stone crumbled 
off a battlement, how little it affects our sense of its 
strength, our faith in its duration. Yet the same cause 
which flung down that one may fling down another and 
another, and what can begin to perish will at last perish 
all. I am not speaking of Christianity as it is in the 
eternal purpose of Almighty God ; but of that image, 
that spiritual copy of it, which grows up in the human 
microcosm. The first is older than the universe — is 
coeval with its Maker ; but the second is frail as the 
being in whom it is formed. 

Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, 
even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason 
must forswear. Faith endures no barking of the surface ; 
it is a fair, delicate plant transported out of Paradise into 
an alien garden, where surest care alone can foster it. 
But wound the tenderest shoot — but break away one 
single flower, and though it linger on for years, feeding 
upon stimulants and struggling through a languishing 
vitality, it has had its death-blow ; the blighted juices 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 189 

fly trembling back into the heart, never to venture out 
again. 

Nevertheless the mind of a young man is very plastic. 
As personal affection lies at the root of our first opinions, 
so the influence of persons whom we love and venerate is 
for a long time paramount ; and, by a natural necessity, 
a mind falling in its growth under the influence of a great 
man, great alike in genius and in character, assumes the 
imprint such a man will fix upon it, and most imitates 
what it most admires. Only wider experience flings us 
back upon ourselves ; the experience which shows us that 
men who, while they unite all the greatest qualities in 
greatest measure, may yet be as various in opinion as in 
the variety of their gifts — as various as the million 
varieties of beautiful objects with which God has orna- 
mented the earth. Painful, indeed, is the moment when 
this first breaks upon us. It is easy to be decided so 
long as we feel so sure that all goodness is on our side ; 
and only badness, moral badness, or else folly can take 
the other ; but how terrible becomes the alternative when 
we know men as they really are ! 

Well, the great men under whose influence I now fell 
dealt tenderly with the imbibed prejudices even of Pro- 
testantism ; and, holding on by persons standing so firmly 
as they seemed to stand, I did not seem to have lost any 
thing — to have weakened my moral footing. They could 
make all allowance, sympathise with my sorrow such as 



140 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

it was, show how it was right and amiable that I should 
feel it ; and, in the position which they had assumed, 
they seemed to have the antidote against the mischief 
from the transfer of allegiance from one set of teachers 
to another, in representing themselves not as speaking 
their own words, but those of the holy mother of us all — 
the Church. So a strange process began to form ; for, 
while it was in reality but their own great persons 
which were drawing us all towards them, they unwill- 
ingly deceived us into believing it was not their 
influence, but the body's power ; and, while in fact we 
were only Newmanites, we fancied we were becoming 
Catholics. 

Most mournful — for in the imagined security of our 
new position, as our minds were now unfolding, with 
deep faith in one great man, we began to follow him 
along the subtles reasoning with which he drew away 
from under us the supports upon which Protestant 
Christianity had been content to rest its weight; we 
allowed ourselves to see its contradictions, to recognise 
the logical strength of the arguments of Hume, to 
acknowledge that the old answers of Campbell, the 
evidences of Paley, were futile as the finger of a child 
on the spoke of an engine's driving-wheel ; nay more, to 
examine the logic of unbelief with a kind of pleasure, as 
hitting our adversaries to the death, and never approach- 
ing us at all. So, gradually unknowing what we did, to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 141 

accept the huge bisection of mankind ; to confine 
Christianiy to the Church visible, and exclude those 
beyond its pale from the blessings of the convenant — to 
recognise the Catholic illustration of the ark — to con- 
tinue the anathemas of the creeds, while we determined 
the objects on whom they rested — to allow the world 
outside to have all talent, all splendor, power, beauty, 
intellect, superiority, even the highest heroic virtues, 
and yet to be without that peculiar goodness which 
flowed out of the body of which the elect were members, 
and which alone gave chance of salvation. 

It is true that we were defrauded of the just indigna- 
tion with which our hearts would have rebelled against 
so terrible a violation of their instincts, by mysterious 
hints of uncovenanted mercies, of grace given to the 
heathen in overflowing kindness ; and gentle softening 
of the more consistent theology of the fathers, which 
flung infants, dying unbaptised, into the everlasting fire 
lake. They would not let us see what they perhaps 
themselves shrunk from seeing, that in the law of Divine 
Providence there is none of this vague unreal trifling ; 
that, if they believed their histories and their illustra- 
tions, they must not flinch from the conclusions. The 
suckinof children of the unchosen were not saved in 
Noah's flood. The cities of the Canaanites were deluged 
with the blood of hundreds of thousands whose innocence 
appeals to outraged humanity What had those poor 



142 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

creatures done to justify their fate more than the Christ- 
ians beyond the pale, or the heathen whose virtues plead 
to have intercession made for them ? 

The Catholics must not trifle with their theory, and on 
this twilight of un covenanted mercies they must allow 
me to ask them these questions. 

Was the Christian sacrifice necessary, or was it 
not ? That is, could mankind be saved without it ? 
You will answer, at least Catholics always do answer, 
They could not. 

To derive the benefit of that sacrifice, is it necessary 
to be within the Church, and receive it through the 
sacraments ? If Yes ; then all beyond derive no benefit, 
and so are lost. If no ; then what do you mean ? There 
is no such thing as ''partially necessary;'^ a thing is 
necessary, or it is not. You will say then — Not necess- 
ary ; but necessary in such and such circumstances — 
wherever God has made it possible. But if God had 
pleased it would have been universally possible ; and 
with an attached natural penalty of eternal damnation, 
which can only be conteracted by a miracle, it is hard to 
conceive him leaving men without the one essential. 

Well, then, do you mean these sacraments are essential 
to the living a saintly life ? But others live saintly 
lives. If they do, you say that is by the extraordinary 
mercy. But the Catholics do not number a tithe of the 
human race — as a rule we do not find a larger proportion 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 143 

of good men among them than among others ; and if, out 
of every age and nation, those who fear God are under 
the influence of His grace, and are in the other world to 
become members of His Church, a larger number by far 
will be taken from those beyond the pale than from 
within it ; and, therefore the Catholics luill receive by the 
extraordinary, the others by the ordinary channels. 
The extra-sacramental is the common way, and how 
strange a system you make the Almighty to have con- 
structed, when it does but answer a tenth of its purpose, 
and the rest is by method of exception. Surely this is 
worse than midsummer madness ! The fathers are right 
— you are ridiculous. It may be that sacramental grace 
is essential ; but the alternative is absolute — it is, or it is 
not. Begin to make exceptions ; bend your line, here a 
little and there a little^a curve for the pious Lutherans, 
an angle for the better sort of heathens — and you will 
soon make your figure a helpless, shapeless no-figure. 
Take up the swimmers into the arh, and they will soon 
outnumber the good family there ; and ark and all will 
go down, and you will have to take common chance in 
the water with the rest. 

No ! the earthly Canaan was given to the chosen 
people without respect of virtue, as Jewish history too 
painfully shows. So with your theory is the heavenly. 
You need not come in with your text, " Many shall come 
from the east and the west," giving it the human sense. 



144 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

which shall save the heathens in the next world. For 
you it means, and but must mean the call of the Gentiles 
under baptism. If you recoil from this conclusion, then, 
in God's name, have done with your covenant and your 
theory ; and do not in the same breath allow and disal- 
low human excellence as a title to heaven, or the doctrine 
of the infinite divisibility of matter must be called in to 
help you in your dividings. 

A few words more shall be said to you, of Avhich you 
shall not like the hearing. I will not prejudge you ; but 
if you believe what you say, to allow us to go on feeding 
ourselves upon the literature of those old glorious 
Greeks and Romans, to think by Aristotle and Cicero, to 
feel by ^schylus and Sophocles, to reproduce among 
ourselves by exclusive study the early figures of those 
great kings, patriots, poets, princes, is the most barbarous 
snare which was ever laid before the feet of weak 
humanity. And you do this — you who profess the care 
of our souls ! Ah, if you did care for them, you would 
up and gird yourselves, and cry — Lea^ve them, leave them 
they are heathens ! Learn your Greek in Athanasius, 
and your Latin in Augustine. Those were God's 
enemies whom He had not chosen, and therefore has 
rejected. The more dangerous because they look so like 
His friends ; but splendid sinners, as the wise fathers 
called them. 
What, gentlemen, do you suppose that I am to make 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 145 

friends with Socrates and Phocion, and believe that 
human nature is full of the devil, and that only baptism 
can give chance for a holy life ? That I will hand Plato 
into destruction ; that Sophocles, and Phidias, and Pindar, 
and Germanicus, and Tacitus, and Aurelius, and Trajan 
were no better than poor unenlightened Pagans, and 
that, where you not only permit me to make acquaint- 
ance with them, but compel me to it as a condition, 
forsooth, under which I may become a minister of the 
Christian faith ! 

You think, perhaps, that I shall draw healthy compar- 
isons, and see what heathenism could not make of man. 
That I will place (I will not compare invidiously) — that 
I will place David above Leonidas, Eusebius above 
Tacitus, Jerome over Plato, Aquinas over Aristotle, and 

yourselves over Ah, Heaven ! where shall 

I find an antitype of you ? You shall let me see a.nd 
love whole generations of men who would live long lives 
of self-denial and heroic daring, for the love of God, and 
virtue, and humanity ; asking no reward but in the con- 
sciousness that they were doing God's will ; and perse- 
vering still, even with the grave as the limit of their 
horizon, because they loved good and hated evil ; and you 
point me out in contrast the noble army of martyrs — 
men who knew how to die in the strength of the faith, 
that death was the gate of eternal Paradise ; and which 
is the noblest, and which is the hardest task, I wonder ? 
J 



146 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

No, the world is mystery enough, no doubt of that, and 
your Catholic Christianity rnay be true ; but, if you 
think so, you, who are your soul's shepherds, at your 
peril be it, close up the literature of the world ; like 
that deeply believing Caliph, close, close our eyes in 
seven-fold blindness against all history except the Bible 
history, and mark out the paths of Christian teaching in 
which you will have us walk within walls hard and 
thick as the adamant round Paradise. 

So much for the digressing upon an argument which I 
have let fall here where it is lying, not as what I felt at 
the time of which I speak, but as what now, as I look 
back over it, appears the logical account of the ill-satis- 
faction which I did feel. It is with argument as it is 
with the poetry of passion — we feel before we can speak 
of what we feel ; and it is only on the return of calmness, 
when the struggle is past and the horizon clear again, 
that we can delineate and analyse our experiences. 



Among all the foolish and unmeaning cries over which 
party spirit has gone distracted, that of ''private judg- 
ment " stands, perhaps, without parallel. Whether, as 
the Protestant explains it, we take it as a right, or as the 
Catholic, as a duty, the right of judging for oneself, or 
the duty of doing both, or one, or neither, whatever we 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 147 

call it, never was so strange a creature brought to birth 
out of our small but fertile imaginings. 

What is right or duty without poiuer ? To tell a man 
it is his duty to submit his judgment to the judgment of 
the church is like telling a wife it is her duty to love her 
husband — a thing easy to say, but meaning simply 
nothing. Affection must be won, not commanded. If 
the husband and the wife both continue the same per- 
sons as they were when they did love each other (sup- 
posing it was so), the love will continue; but if the 
natures change, either of both or one of them, and become 
antipathetic, it would be as reasonable to lecture oxygen 
and hydrogen on the duty of continuing in combination 
when they are decomposed by galvanism. They may, 
indeed, be forcibly held together in juxtaposition 
by external restraint ; but combined they are not. 
And, while they are as they are, they cannot be 
combined. 

So it is with the church and its members. As long 
as the church has the power to mould the minds of her 
children after her own sort, in such a way that their 
coherence in her shall be firm enough to overcome what- 
ever external attraction they may fall within the sphere 
of, so long she has a right to their hearts. While she has 
the power to employ the external restraints of hope and 
fear — so long as she can torture and scourge, or so long 
as she directs public opinion, and her frown can entail 



148 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

any practical inconvenience — so long she has a right to 
the external conformity of such individuals as are of a 
• kind to be governed by such considerations. As soon as 
she loses both, the bereaved lady may still cry, '' I have 
a right to your affections, it is your duty to submit 
to me ; " but she will have lost her divine sanction, 
and would be about as reasonable as the last of the 
Stuarts whining over his rights to the duty of the 
English. 

Again, for an individual, be he who he will, in a world 
where faculties are so unequally distributed, and some 
are weaker than others, to say he has a right to be his 
own teacher, or to choose who he will have for a teacher, 
is much as if a satelite of Jupiter betrayed a disposition 
to set up on his own account, or took a fancy to older 
ways and wished to transfer his allegiance to Saturn. If 
Saturn left his orbit, and came down for him, and by 
right of stronger attraction could take him away 
in a struggle, then of course he would have a right 
to him. 

So it is with us all. I use magnetic illustrations, not 
because I think the mind magnetic, but because magnetic 
comparisons are the nearest we have, and the laws are 
exactly parallel. Minds vary in sensitiveness and in 
self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction 
and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are 
governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 149 

that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power 
over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet ? Take a 
bar of steel, its component atoms cohere by attraction ; 
turn oif the current of electricity, or find means to nega- 
tive it, and the bar becomes a dust heap. The earth's 
attraction calls off this portion, the wind scatters that, or 
another magnetic body in the neighborhood Y\dll proceed 
to appropriate. So it is with belief ; belief is the result 
of the proportion, whatever it be, in which the many 
elements which go to make the human being are com- 
bined. In some the grosser nature preponderates ; they 
believe largelj^ in their stomachs, in the comforts and con- 
veniences of life, and being of such kind, so long as 
these are not threatened, thej^ gravitate steadily towards 
the earth. Numerically this is the largest class of be- 
lievers, with very various denominations indeed ; bearing 
the names of every faith beneath the sky, and composing 
the conservative elements in them, and therefore com- 
monly persons of much Aveight in established systems. 
But they are what 1 have called them : their hearts are 
where I said they were, and as such interests are 
commonly selfish, and self separates instead of unites, 
they are not generally powerful against any heavy trial. 
Others of keener susceptibility are yet volatile, with 
slight power of countenance, and fly from attraction to 
attraction in the current of novelty. Others of stronger 
temper gravitate more slowly, but combine more firmly, 



150 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

and only disunite again when the idea or soul of the body 
into which they form dies out, or they fall under the 
influence of some very attractive force indeed. It may 
be doubted, indeed, whether a body which is really organ- 
ised by a living idea, can lose a healthy member except 
by violence. 

If it be difficult to follow the subtle features of electric 
affinity among the inorganic bodies or simplest elemental 
combinations, it may well be thought impossible 
in organisms so curiously complicated as that of the 
human being. However, such as it is, the illustration 
will serve. 

The cry of private judgment meant simply this, that 
the authority of the office was ceasing to influence, and 
was being superseded by the authority of the gifted man 
— that the church had lost its power, perhaps its life, and 
was decomposing. The talk of the duty of determining 
to remain in her upon private judgment, was an attempt 
to inspire the atoms which were flying off" with salutary 
fear of consequences, which would submit them again to 
her control. 

Well, as we had none of us any very clear idea to mag- 
netize us, and as yet had not approached the point when 
the other influences would come to bear upon us, and we 
should begin to feel the gravitation downwards in the 
necessity of getting on in the world, the leader of the 
movement took us all his own way; all that is who 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 151 

were not Arnoldized. And even some of these he con- 
trived to draw away by the nearness and continuance of 
his action upon them, as the comet's attraction played 
the deuce with Jupiter's satellites while he continued in 
their neighborhood. It is true we thought, yes, we 
thought we were following the church : but it was like 
the goose in the child's toy, which is led by the 
nose up and down the basin by the piece of bread 
. . . by the piece of bread .... with the load- 
stone inside it. 

Well, everybody remembers the history of the Tracts, 
and how the doctrine of development began to show 
itself as the idea grew; threatening such mighty changes 
and how unsteady minds began to grow uneasy ; and 
heads of houses to frown, and bishops to deliver 
charges. Hitherto these Tracts had represented pretty 
exactly Anglican Oxford. Though dangerously clever, 
and more dangerously good, they had never broken 
bounds, and the unenthusiastic authorities had found 
themselves unable to do more than warn, and affect to 
moderate. The world outside seemed partially to smile 
on the movement, as at any rate a digging over an 
unproductive soil. Rome was never spoken of as the 
probable goal of any but a few foolish young men, whose 
presence would be injurious to any cause, and who were 
therefore better in the enemy's camp than at home. 
And no worldly interests had as yet been threatened 



152 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

with damage, except perhaps the Friday dinner and the 
Lent second course : the loss of which, being not enough 
to be painful, became a piquant stimulant, and gave 
edge to appetite. 

Now, to a single-minded man, who is either brave 
enough or reckless enough to surrender himself wholly 
to one idea, and look neither right nor left, but only 
forward, what earthly consequences may follow is not 
material. Persecution strengthens him ; and so he is 
sure he is right, whether his course end in a prison or on 
a throne is no matter at all. But men of this calibre 
are uncommon in any age or in any country — very 
uncommon in this age and this country. Most of us are 
sent to universities or wherever it may be, not merely to 
be educated into men, but to ^et along in the world ; 
make money, it may be called, in an invidious way ; but 
it is not only to make money ;^it is that we may take 
up our own position in life, 8.nd support ourselves in the 
scale of society where we were born. We are placed in 
a road along which we have only to travel steadily, and 
the professions, as they are called, are trodden in by the 
experience of the common sense of mankind, making 
large advance and best success quite possible to average 
hack genius, which would make nothing of its across 
country. The world cares little about theology; and 
the worldly professions soon leave it out of account 
except on Sunday. But to the Oxford 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 153 

students, and particularly to such of them as form the 
opinion of Oxford, theology itself is the profession. 
Chosen as a profession, it is followed with professional 
aims, and, as the idea of the Tracts grew clearer and 
more exclusive, the time came when the angle at which 
the line of its course inclined towards the professional 
influence became obtuse instead of acute, and this last 
began to retard. 

It became necessary to surrender tutorships, fellow- 
ships, and the hopes of them; to find difficulties in 
getting ordained, to lose slowly the prospects of pleasant 
curacies, and livings, and parsonage houses, and the 
sweet little visions of home paradises — a serious thing 
to young high churchmen, who were commonly of the 
amiable enthusiastic sort, and so, of course, had fallen 
most of them into early engagements ..... and 
from this time the leader's followers began to lag behind. 
" They turned back, and walked no more after him." I 
am not blaming them. They did not know what was 
governing them, and, if they did, they would have had 
very much to urge for themselves. It is no light thing 
this mortifying the hopes of friends, who have, perhaps, 
made painful sacrifices to lift us forward. It is no light 
thing to encounter the hard words and hard facts of life, 
without sympathy, till the cause is won and it is not 
needed ; rather perhaps with the coldness of those we 
love, the sneers of society, the three meals a-day never 



154 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

slacking their claims, and the wherewithal to provide 
them poorly forthcoming. 

The idea drives a man into the wilderness before he 

comes to the land of milk and honey and 

little water and the scanty sprinkling of angels' food he 
must make shift to be content with. Speculation bakes 
no bread, and often, too, the sinking heart flags and fails 
to trust itself, and the moments of insight are short, and 
the hours of despondency are long, and the unsteady 
reason rises among vague misgivings, and points 
reproachfully back to the flesh pots of Egypt, which we 
have left to die in the desert. After all, too, is not the 
beaten road, a road which men have beaten, good men 
who had God's grace in them. Surely what presumption 
is it not for here and there a self-wise impertinent 
to refuse to listen to the old practised guides, and fly off*, 
he knows not where, after a mirage he calls an " idea!^ 

Peace, peace, perturbed spirits ! Perfection 

in this world is a dream Poor sheep ! 

listen to the call of your shepherd ; turn back before the 
sand overwhelm you. ...... So reason with 

themselves the many half -worshippers of truth, and they 
turn back and find their account in turning. They find 
their account in the peace they sought. Genius only has 
a right to choose its own way, for genius only has the 
power to face wdiat it will find there. There is a lion in 
the path let the common man keep clear 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 165 

of him. So all men gravitate into their spheres ; only 
woe to those who swing suspended in the balance, and 
can follow heartily neither earth nor heaven. 

There is genius, with its pale face and worn dress, and 
torn friendships and bleeding heart .... strong 
only in struggling ; counting all loss but truth and love 
of God ; rev/arded, as men court reward, perhaps by an 
after apotheosis, yet never seeking this reward or that 
reward, save only its own good conscience steady to its 
aim, promising nothing ; least of all peace — only strug- 
gles which are to end but with the grave. 

And there is respectability, with its sweet smiling home, 
and loving friends, and happy family, a fair green spring, 
a golden summer, an autumn sinking fruit-loaded to the 
earth — the final winter rest following on the full finished 
course of gentle duty done, and for the future prospects 
easy and secure. Choose between them, man, at the 
parting of the ways ! Choose. You may have one, both 
you cannot have. Either will give you to yourself — 
either perhaps to God. Yet, if you do choose the first, 
choose it with all your heart. You will need it all to 
bear what will be laid upon you. No wistful lookings 
back upon the pleasant land which you are leaving — no 
playing with life. You have chosen the heart of things, 
not the surface ; and it is no child's play. Fling aivay 
your soul once for all, your own small self ; if you will 
find it again. Count not even on immortality. St. 



156 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Paul would make himself anathema for the brethren. 
Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages by 
the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living 
prophet. Small honor for you if they do build it ; and 
maybe they will never build it. A thousand patriots go to 
the scaffold amidst the execrations of decent mankind. 
Out of these thousand, perhaps the after generation 
remembers one young Emmett ; and his name finds hon- 
orable memory ; and young ladies drop sentimental tears 
on the piano notes as they sing the sorrows of his broken- 
hearted bride. 

Enough of this But once in our lives w^e 

have all to choose. More or less we have all felt the same 
emotions. We have not always been what the profes- 
sions make of us. Nature made us men, and she 
surrenders not her children without a struggle. I will 
go back to my story now with but this one word, that it 
is these sons of genius, and the fate they meet with, 
which is to me the one sole evidence that there is more 
in " this huge state " than what is seen, and that in very 
truth the soul of man is not a thing which comes and 
goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in 
which it is set to dvv^ell, but a very living force, a very 
energy of God's organic Will, which rules and moulds 
this universe. 

For what are they ? Say not, say not, it is but a 
choice which they have made ; and an immortality of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 157 

glory in heaven shall reward them for what they have 
sacrificed on earth. It may be so ; but they do not ask for 
it. They are what they are from the Divine power 
which is in them, and you would never hear their 
complainings if the grave was the gate of annihilation. 

Say not they have their reward on earth in the calm 
satisfaction of noble desires, nobly gratified, in the sense 
of great works greatly done; that too may be, but 
neither do they ask for that. They alone never remem- 
ber themselves ; they know no end but to do the will 
which beats in their heart's deep pulses. Ay, but for 
these, these few martyred heroes, it might be after all 
that the earth was but a huge loss-and-profit ledger book ; 
or a toy machine some great angel had invented for the 
amusement of his nursery ; and the storm and the sun- 
shine but the tears and the smiles of laughter in which 
he and his baby cherubs dressed their face over the grave 
and solemn airs of slow-paced respectability. 

Yes, genius alone is the Redeemer; it bears our sorrows, 
it is crowned with thorns for us ; the children of genius 
are the church militant, the army of the human race. 
Genius is the life, the law of mankind, itself perishing, 
that others may take possession and enjoy. Religion, 
freedom, science, law, the arts, mechanical or beautiful, 
all which gives respectability a chance, have been moulded 
out by the toil and the sweat and the blood of the faith- 
ful ; who, knowing no enjoyment, were content to be 



158 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

the servants of their own born slaves, and wrought out 
the happiness of the world which despised and disowned 
them. 

So much for the sons of genius .... one of whom — 
perhaps one of three or four at present alive in this 
planet — was at that time rising up in Oxford, and 
drawing all men towards him. I myself was so far 
fortunate, that the worldly influence of which I spoke 
did not so immediately bear upon me. I was, as the 
phrase goes, moderately provided for ; and, in my own 
reflectings upon the matter, it seemed to me that I in 
a way ought to take advantage of a fortunate posi- 
tion ; and, without judging the motives of others who 
acted differently because I could not tell how I myself 
might have acted if I had been tempted in the same 
way, to follow on where the direct course seemed to 
lead me. 

Life complete, is lived in two worlds ; the one inside, 
and the one outside. The first half of our days is spent 
wholly in the former ; the second, if it is what it ought 
to be, wholly in the latter — Pretty well till we have 
done with our educating theories are only words to us, 
and church controversy not of things but of shadows of 
things. Through all that time life and thought beyond 
our own experience is but a great game played out by 
book actors ; we do not think, we only think we think, 
and we have been too busy in our own line to have a 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 159 

notion really of what is beyond it. But while so much of 
our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fall- 
ings, aspirings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real 
enough to us ; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of 

our own mysteries It was into these that N.'s 

power of insight was so remarkable. I believe no young 
man ever heard him preach without fancying that some 
one had been betraying his own history, and the sermon 
was aimed specially at him. It was likely that, while 
he had possession so complete of what we did know 
about ourselves, we should take his word for what we 
did not ; and while he could explain us, let him explain 
the rest for us. But it is a problem heavier than has been 
yet laid on theologians to make what the world has now 
grown into square with the theory of Catholicism. And 
presently as we began to leave the nest, and though 
under his eye, fly out and look about for ourselves, some 
of us began to find it so. I was not yet acquainted with 
any of the modern continental writers, but I had read 
a great deal of English, and clouds of things began to 
rise before me in lights wonderfully different from those 
in which I used to see them. I will not go along the 
details, but I will lay down a few propositions, all of 
which were granted, with the conclusions I myself was 
tempted to draw, and those which I was taught to draw. 
1. That, ]f the Catholic theory be true, it is not 
only necessary to talk of hating the Reformation, but 



160 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

one must hate it with a hearty good- will as a rending of 
the body of Christ .... and yet .... 

That in the sixteenth century the church was full of 
the most fearful abuses ; that many of' the clergy were 
unbelievers, and many more worldly and sensual ; that 
to what we call an honest simple understanding, it 
had become a huge system of fraud, trickery, and impos- 
ture. Granted. 

2. That the after Reformation in the Roman Catholic 
church was, humanly speaking, a consequence of the great 
revolt from her, which had shamed her into exerting her- 
self. Granted. 

3. That, ever since, the nations which have remained 
Catholic have become comparatively powerless, while the 
Protestant nations have uniformly risen ; that each 
nation, in fact, has risen exactly as it has emancipated 
itself. Granted. 

4. That the Catholic church since the Reformation has 
produced no great man of science, no statesman, no phil- 
osopher, no poet. Granted. 

5. That historical criticism, that scientific discovery 
have unifoTvuly tended to invalidate the authority of his- 
tories to which the infallable church has committed her- 
self. Granted. 

6. That the personal character of the people in all 
Roman Catholic countries is poor and mean ; that they 
are untrue in their words, unsteady in their actions, dis- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. IGl 

respecting themselves in the entire tenor of their life and 
temper. Granted. 

7. And that this was to be traced to the moral depen- 
dence in which they were trained; to the conscience 
being taken out of their own hands and deposited 
with the priests ; to the disrespect with which this 
life is treated by the Catholic theory ; the low esteem in 
which the human will and character are considered; 
and, generally, to the condition of spiritual bondage in 
which they are held. Not granted, but to be believed 
nevertheless. 

Now if these things were facts, taken alone at least, 
they were unquestionably serious. Happily I had very 
early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and 
verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as 
little conclusive in theology as in physics ; and, in one as 
in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however 
plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which 
was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the 
attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by 
experiment. " Here is a theory of the world which you 
bring for my acceptance : well, there is the world ; try 
— will the key fit ? can you read the language into sense 
by it ? " was the only method ; and so I was led always 
to look at broad results, at pages and chapters, rather 
than at single words and sentences, where for a few lines 
a false key may serve to make a meaning. . « . . # 



162 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

So of these broad observations I only expected a broad 
solution. I did not draw conclusions for myself, I never 
yet doubted ; but I wished to be told what I was to make 
of facts so startling. 

These answers which follow I do not mean to say 
were given categorically to categorically asked ques- 
tions, but on the whole they are such as were in various 
ways and at considerable intervals of time suggested 
to me. 

1. Either it was true or it was not true, that man was 
fallen and required redemption ; that from the beginning 
of time a peculiar body of people, not specially distin- 
guished for individual excellencies, had nevertheless been 
the objects of peculiar care, the channels of peculiar 
grace ; that their language was inspired, their priests 
divinely guided. 

2. If this was true, we were not to demand at present 
results which never had been found. 

3. That the Spirit worked not visibly, but invisibly. 

4. That my arguments told not only against Catholic- 
ism, hut against Christianity ^ considered as historical 
and exclusive. 

5. That Protestant Christianity on the Continent 
had uniformly developed into ^ocinianism, and thence 
into Pantheism, and from a fact was becoming an idea 
merely. 

6. That Catholicism altogether was a preternatural 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 163 

system, treating the world as a place of trial and tempta- 
tion, and the De^il as the main director of what 
seemed greatest and most powerful in it ; and, therefore, 
that we should least look among Christians for such 
power and greatness ; and broken-hearted penitence 
was not likely to produce such effects as seemed to me 
so admirable. 

7. The Bible everywhere denounced the world as the 
enemy of God, not as the friend of God ; and by the 
world must be meant the real world of fact, not a fantas- 
tic world of all kinds of vice and wickedness, which 
had no existence beyond our own imaginings. The 
world was always what the world is now — a world of 
greatness as well as pleasure — of intellect, power, beauty, 
nobleness. This was the world we foreswore in baptism, 
and in our creed denounced. The temper of a saint was 
quite different from the temper of a world's great man ; 
and we had no right, because we found this last attractive 
and beautiful, to assume that he was not therefore what 
the Bible warned us against. If man is fallen, his unsanc- 
tified virtues are vices. 

9. That the hold of Christianity was on the heart, and 
not on the reason. Reason was not the whole of us ; 
and alone it must ever lead to infidelity. 

10. Finally, we were Christians, or we were not. 
Confessedly Christianity was mysterious ; the mysterious 
solution of a mysterious world ; not likely to be reason- 



164 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

able. If once we began accommodating and assimilating, 
shrinking from that difficulty, and stretching our creed 
to this, expanding liberalism would grow stronger by 
concessions. The Bible warned us sternly enough of 
what we were, and of the little right we had to place 
confidence in ourselves. Unbelief was a sin, not a 
mistake, and deserved not argument, but punishment. 

It was enough for me to learn, as now I soon did, that 
all real arguments against Catholicism were, in fact, 
arguments against Christianity ; and I was readily 
induced to acknowledge that the Reformation had been 
the most miserable infatuation. The world was an 
enemy dangerous enough without home feuds ; and the 
Reformers, in allowing reason to sit in judgment in 
matters of faith, in appealing to common sense, and in 
acknowledging the right of personal independence, were 
introducing elements, no one of which could produce 
anything but falsehood, in a system which recognised 
none of them, which was divine, not human, and, being 
divinely founded, had the promise of divine sustaining. 
I saw that in denying the continual authority of the 
Church's witness, and falling back on individual experi- 
ence, or historic testimony, they had, in fact, cut away 
the only support on which Revelation could at all sustain 
itself. That in the cry of " the Bible, and the Bible 
only " (setting aside the absurdity of the very idea, as if 
the Bible was not written in human language, and 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 1G5 

language not dependent for interpretation upon tradition ; 
1 say, setting aside this), men are assuming the very 
point at issue; for, if the Church was mistaken, why must 
the Bible be true ? That is, why must it be wholly true ? 
why not contain the same alloy of true and false to be 
found in all other books ? 

In fact, they had cut the roots of the tree ; for a few 
years it might retain some traces of its old life ; but 
they had broken off the supply, and they were but trad- 
ing on what was left of the traditionary reverence for the 
Bible which the Church had instilled into mankind. 
Experience had shown, that the same reason which 
rejected the Saints' miracles as incredible would soon 
make hard mouths at the Bible miracles. The notion of 
inspiration was no more satisfactory than that of the 
Church's infallibility ; and if the power of the keys, a,nd 
sacramental grace, and apostolic succession, were absurd- 
ities, the Devil was at least equally so. And with the 
Devil fell sin, and the atonement fell, and all revelation 
fell ; and we were drifting on the current of a 
wide ocean, we knew not where, with neither oar nor 
compass. 

And so I held on, with all my heart, in the power of 
old association ; and, clinging fast to what I could com- 
prehend of our leader's views, for a time dreamed they 
were my own. Hitherto, in considering the existing 
unhappy state of Catholic countries, England, unques- 



166 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

tionably the strongest country in the world, we had taken 
as a Protestant country. The tendency of Catholicism 
we saw to be to depress the external character of man ; 
that, the deeper he believed it, the more completely he 
became subdued. Protestantism, on the contrary, culti- 
vated man outwards on every side, insisted on self- 
reliance, taught every one to stand alone, and depend 
himself on his own energies. Now, then, came the ques- 
tion of the Church of England— was it Catholic, was it 
Protestant ? for, if this were Protestantism, surely the 
English, as a nation, were the most Protestant in the world. 
Long before the Reformation, the genius of independence 
had begun to struggle for emancipation among them, 
and the dazzling burst of the Elizabethan era was the 
vigorous expansion of long-imprisoned energy, spring- 
ing out in bounding joyous freedom. The poets, from 
Chaucer to Milton, were, without exception, on the 
reforming side ; and the strong, practical heart of the 
country found its fullest and clearest expression in 
Oliver Cromwell. Unquestionably the English were 
Protestants in the fullest sense of the word ; yet in 
spite of this unhealthy symptom, the English Church 
had retained, apparently providentially, something of a 
Catholic character. It had retained the Succession, it 
had retained the Sacraments, it had retained Liturgical 
forms, which committed it to the just Catholic under- 
standing of them. The question with the Tract writers 



THE XEMESIS OF FAITH. 167 

was, whether, with the help of this old framework they 
could unprotestantize its working character, and reinspire 
it with so much of the old life as should enable it to do 
the same work in England which the Roman Church 
produced abroad ; to make England cease to produce 
great men — as we count greatness — and for poetry, cour- 
age, daring, enterprise, resolution, and broad honest 
understanding, substitute devotion, endurance, humility, 
self-denial, sanctity, and faith. This was the question at 
issue. It might take other names ; it might resent the 
seeing itself represented so broadly. But this was, at 
heart, what it meant, if it meant anything — to produce a 
wholly diflferent type of character. It was no longer now 
a nice dispute about authority. Long-sighted men saw 
now that Christianity itself had to fight for its life, and 
that, unless it was very soon to die in England, as it had 
died in Germany and France, something else than the 
broad solid English sense must be inoculated into the 
hearts of us. We were all liberalizing as we were going 
on, making too much of this world, and losing our hold 
upon the next ; forgetting, as we all had, that the next 
was the only real world, and this but a thorny road to 
it, to be trod with bleeding feet, and broken spirits. It 
was high time. 

What a sight must this age of ours have been to an 
earnest believing man like Newman, who had an eye to 
see it, and an ear to hear its voices ? A foolish Church, 



168 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

chattering, parrot-like, old notes, of which it had forgot 
the meaning ; a clergy who not only thought not at all, 
but whose heavy ignorance, from long unreality, clung 
about them like a garment, and who mistook their fool's 
cap and bells for a crown of wisdom, and the music of 
the spheres ; selfishness alike recognized practically as 
the rule of conduct, and faith in God, in man, in virtue, 
exchanged for faith in the belly, in fortunes, carriages, 
lazy sofas, and cushioned pews : Bentham politics, and 
Paley religion ; all the thought deserving to be called 
thought, the flowing tide of Germany, and the philoso- 
phy of Hume and Gibbon ; all the spiritual feeling, the 
light froth of the Wesleyans and Evangelicals ; and 
the only real stern life to be found anywhere, in a strong 
resolved and haughty democratic independence, heaving 
and rolling underneath the chaff-spread surface. How 
was it like to fare with the clergy gentlemen, and 
the Church turned respectable, in the struggle with 
enemies like these ? Erastianism, pluralities, prebendal 
stalls, and pony-gigging pa^rsons — what work were they 
like to make against the proud, rugged, intellectual 
republicanism, with a fire sword between its lips, bidding 
cant and lies be still ; and philosophy, with Niebuhr 
criticism for a reaping sickle, mowing down their darling- 
story-books ? High time it was to move indeed. High 
time for the Church warriors to look about them, to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 169 

burnish up their armor, to seize what ground was yet 
remaining, what time to train for the battle. 

It would not serve to cultivate the intellect. All over 
Europe, since Spinoza wrote, what of strongest intellect 
there was had gone over to the enemy. Genius was 
choosing its own way, acknowledging no longer the 
authority either of man or document ; and unless in 
some way or other the heart could be preoccupied — - 
unless the Church could win back the love of her child- 
ren, and temper them quite differently from the tone in 
which they were now tempered, the cause was lost — and 
for ever. So, then, they must begin with the clergy. To 
wean the Church from its Erastianism into militancy, 
where it might at least command respect for its sincerity 
— to wean the bishops from their palaces and lazy car- 
riages and fashionable families, the clergy from their 
snug firesides and marrying and giving in marriage : this 
was the first step. Slowly ihen to draw the people out 
of the whirl of business to thought upon themselves — 
from self-assertion, for the clamoring for their rights, and 
the craving for independence, to almsgiving, to endurance 
of wrong, to the confessional — from doing to praying — 
from early hours in the office, or in the field, to matins 
and daily service: this was the purpose of the Tract 
movement. God knows, if Christianity be true, a pur- 
pose needful enough to get fulfilled. For surely it is 
madness, if the world be the awful place the Bible says it 



170 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

is, the Devil's kinordom — the battle-field between sfood 
and evil spirits for the eternal happiness or eternal per- 
dition of human souls — to go out, as we all do, clergy and 
all of ns — to go out into its highwa5^s and dust our fee "" 
along its thoioughfares ; to take part in its amusements ; 
to eat, and drink, and labor, and enjoy our labor s fruit, 
and find our home and happiness here. Madness ! yes, 
and far worse than madness 1 For once more, the world 
is not visibly at least the hideous place our early religion 
dreams it to be ; it is not a world of profligates and pick- 
pockets, and thieves and sensualists ; it is a world of 
men and women, not all good, but better far than bad ; a 
world of virtue, as man's heart deems virtue ; of human 
feelings, sympathies, and kindness ; a world we cannot 
enter into without loving it ... . and yet, if we 
love it, we are to die. 

Oh, most miserable example of disbelief in their 
own precepts are the English clergy ! Denouncing 
the world, they yet live in it ; speaking in the old 
language against indulgence, and luxury, and riches, 
and vanity in the pulpit, how is it that they cannot 
bring themselves, neither they nor their families, to 
descend from the social position, as they call it, in which 
they were born ? Why must they be for ever gentlemen ? 
Why is it that the only unworldliness to be found among 
them is but among those to whom poverty leaves no 
alternative ? 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 171 

It was a worldly Church ; yes, there was no doubt of 
it; and, being so, it early began to scent danger, to cry 
out and anathematize the new teachers who prescribed a 
severer doctrine ; who were trjnng to shame the clergy 
into a more consistent life Vjy reminding them of the dig- 
nity of their office. Newman had dared to tell them 
that their armour was pasteboard ; the oil dying out of 
their lamps; that a tempest was rising which would 
scatter them like chaff before it. Catholic feeling — 
Catholic energy — Catholic doctrine, exhibited in holy 
life, in prayer, and fasting, their own witness at least of 
their own fidelity, might save them. It was a chance, 
only a chance : but their last. Let them rouse them- 
selves, and see what they did really believe, and why 
they believed ; above all let them come forward in deed 
as well as word, and prove that they were alive : with a 
faith really heart-rooted, they might yet stand in the 
storm ; but their logic props were bruised reeds indeed. 

And what was his reward ? He 

was denounced as a Cassandra prophet ; bid, go get him 
gone, shake the dust from off his feet, and depart to his 
own place. He took them at their word, and left the 
falling house, not without scorn. A little more slumber, 
a little more sleep. It was the sluggard's cry, let them 
find the sluggard's doom. But I had left him, too, before 
this. I have outrun my own small history, and I must 
fall back upon my own adventures. He was not the only 



172 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

greatly gifted man then living in this England. I think 
he was one of two. Another eye, deep-piercing as his, 
and with a no less wide horizon, was looking out across 
the same perplexed scene, and asking his heart, too, what 
God would tell him of it. Some one says that the acci- 
dent of a ten years' earlier or later birth into this world 
may determine the whole direction and meaning of the 
most powerful of minds. The accident of local circum- 
stances may produce the same result. Men form their 
texture out of the atmosphere which they inhale, and 
incline this way or that way as the current of the wind 
in which they stand. Newman grew up in Oxford, in 
lectures, and college chapels, and school divinity ; Mr. 
Carlyle, in the Scotch Highlands, and the poetry of 
Goethe. I shall not in this place attempt to acknowledge 
all I owe to this very great man ; but about three years 
before Newman's secession, chance threw in my way the 
" History of the French Kevolution." I shall but carica- 
ture my feelings if I a^ttempt to express them ; and, 
therefore, I Avill only say that for the first time now it 
was brought home to me, that two men may be as sincere, 
as earnest, as faithful, as uncompromising, and yet hold 
opinions far asunder as the poles. I have before said 
that I think the moment of this conviction is the most 
perilous crisis of our lives ; for myself, it threw me at 
once on my own responsibility, and obliged me to look 
for myself at what men said, instead of simply accepting 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 173 

all because they said it. I began to look about me 
to listen to what had to be said on many sides of the 
question, and try, as far as I could, to give it all fair 
hearing. 

Newman talked much to us of the surrender of reason. 
Reason, first of every thing, must be swept away, so 
daily more and more unreasonable appeared to modern 
eyes so many of the doctrines to which the Church was 
committed. As I began to look into what he said about 
it, the more difticult it seemed to me. What did it 
mean ? Reason could only be surrendered by an act of 
reason. Even the Church's infallible judgments could 
only be received through the senses, and apprehended by 
reason ; why, if reason was a false guide, should Ave 
trust one act of it more than another ? Fall back on 
human faculty sorncAvhere Ave must, and how could a 
superstructure stone be raised on a chaff foundation ? 
While I was perplexing myself about this, there came a 
sermon from him in St. Mary's, once much spoken of, 
containing a celebrated sentence. The sermon is that on 
the development of religious doctrine — the sentence is 
this : " Scripture says the earth is stationary and the 
sun moves; science, that the sun is stationary and that 
the earth moves." For a moment it seemed as if every one 
present heard in those Avords the very thing they had all 
wished for and had long Avaited for — the final mesothesis 
for the reconciling the two great rivals, Science and 



174 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Revelation ; and yet it was that sentence which at once 
cleared up my doubts the other way, and finally de- 
stroyed the faith I had in Newman, after "Tract 90" 
had shaken it. For to what conclusions will it drive us ? 
If Scripture does not use the word "motion" in the 
sense in which common writers use it, it uses it in some 
transcendental sense by hypothesis beyond our know- 
ledge. Therefore Scripture tells us nothing except what 
may be a metaphysical unattainable truth. But if 
Scripture uses one word in such sense without giving 
us warning, why not more words ? Why not every 
word and every sentence ? And Scripture, instead of a 
revelation, becomes a huge mysterious combination of 
one knows not what ; and, what is worse, seeming all 
the while to have a plain and easy meaning constructed 
purposely to lead us astray. The very thing which Des 
Cartes, at the outset of his philosophy, thought it 
necessary to examine the probability of, whether, that 
is, Deus qiiidam deceptor existat, who can intentionally 
deceive us. Nor is the difficulty solved in the v^ery least 
by the theory of an infallible interpretation of Scripture. 
For, by hypothesis, the interpretings are by the Holy 
Spirit ; the same spirit which has played one such strange 
trick, and may therefore do it again ; nay, is most likely 
to do it again and again. 

This is carrying out the renunciation of the reason 
with a vengeance. Perhaps it is consistent, the legiti- 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. l7o 

mate development of the idea ; the position which all 
defenders of Bible infallibility must at last be driven to 
assume. Deepest credulity and deepest scepticism have 
been commonly believed to be near neighbours ; but we 
have but to state it in its nakedness, and the strain so long 
drawn by the mystery of revelation upon submission and 
distrust of our own ignorance is overdrawn at last. . . . 
We may not know much, but we know enough to feel 
that, if mankind were compelled to accept a doctrine so 
monstrous, suicide and madness would speedily make 
empty benches in the Church Catholic. 

No ; once for all, I felt this could not be. If there 
were no other way to save Scripture than this, then, in 
the name of plain sense and honesty, let Scripture go. 
Yet, here we had been brought at last, amidst the noise 
and clatter of tongues, and that by a man who had the 
deepest moral insight into the human heart, and the 
keenest of logical intellects. It was enough to shake our 
confidence in our own reason that his reason could accept 
and be satisfied by such a theory; and certainly, let 
passion adopt what view it will, that treacherous wit of 
ours will contrive to make a case for it. 

Here it was at any rate that I finally cast off*. Further 
along that track I would not go. I could not then see 
the full force of the alternative, and the compelling 
causes which were urging him. I could not believe all 
was indeed so utterly at stake. I would try for myself. 



176 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

He went on to the end — to the haven where sooner or 
later it was now clear he must anchor at last. The 
argument for the Catholicity of the English church 
continued the same, but he on whom they were to tell 
was changed. He might have borne her supineness if 
he could have found the life in her for which he thirsted ; 
but, as his desires deepened with his advances in the 
real feeling of Christianity, it was natural that his 
heart should incline where he could tind them most fully 
gratified. 

If there be any such thing as sin, in proportion to the 
depth with which men feel it, they Avill gravitate 
towards Rome. 

If it be true that the souls even of holy men are as 
continually contracting infirmity as their bodies are ; if 
absolution is as constantly necessary for the one as 
ablution is for the other; as men of cleaidy habits of 
body are more sensitive to the most trifling dirt spot, 
so men of sensitive consciences are miserable under 
taints upon a surface which to a vulgar eye seems pure 
as snow .... add to this the conviction that the 
priest's voice and hand alone can dispense the purifying 
stream ; and beyond question, where the fountain runs 
the fullest, tliither they will seek to go. 

And sin with Newman was real ; not a misfortune to 
be pitied and allowed for ; to be talked of gravely in 
he pulpit, and forgotten when out of it ; not a thing to 



NEMESIS OF FxVITH. 177 

be sentimentally sighed over at the evening tea-party, 
with complacent feeling that we were pleasing Heaven 
by calling ourselves children of hell, but in very truth a 
dreadful monster, a real child of a real devil, so dreadful 
that at its &rst appearance among mankind it had con- 
vulsed the infinite universe, and that nothing less than a 
sacrifice, so tremenduous that the mind sinks crushed 
before the contemplation of it, could restore the de- 
ranged balance. Unreasonable as it seemed, he really 
believed this ; and, given such an element among us as 
this, one may well give over hope of finding truth by 
reasonable analysis and examination of evidence. One 
must go with what haste one can to the system which 
best understands this monster sin, which is best provided 
with remedies and arms against it. To the dry mathe- 
maticizing reason, the ■ Catholic, the Angio-Catholic, the 
Lutheran, Calvinist, the Socinian, will be equally un- 
acceptable; and the philosopher will somewhat con- 
temptuously decline giving either of them the intellectual 
advantage. But sin is of faith, not of mathematics. 
And a real human heart, strong enough and deep enough 
to see it and feel it in its enormity, will surely choose 
from among the various religions that one where the 
sacraments are most numerous and most constant, and 
absolution is more than a name, and confession is possible 
without episcopal interdictings. 

For myself I fell off; not because I had determined 
L 



178 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

not to follow, but because I had not yet felt this intensity 
of hunger and of thirst which could drive me to accept the 
alternative, a.nd consent to so entire an abandonment of 
myself. I had learnt enough of the reality and awful- 
ness of human life not to play with it; and I 
shrunk before what at least might be a sin against my 
own soul. 

My eyes were opening slowly to see for myself the 
strangeness of this being of ours. I had flung myself off 
into space, and seen this little earth ball careering 
through its depths; this miserable ball, not a sand grain 
in the huge universe of suns, and yet to which such a 
strangely mysterious destiny was said to have been 
attached. I had said to myself. Can it be that God, 
Almighty God, He, the Creator himself, went down and 
took the form of one of those miserable insects crawling" 
on its surface, and died himself to save their souls ? I 
had asked the question. Did ever man ask it honestly, 
and answer yes ? Many men have asked it with a fore- 
gone conclusion ; but that is not to ask it. I say, did 
ever man who doubted, find his own heart give him back 
the Church's answer ? 

I know not. I answered nothing ; but I went down 
ao^ain upon my old earth home ; and, with no anxiety for 
claiming any so high kindred for my race, I felt myself 
one among them ; I felt that they were my brothers, and 
among them my lot was cast. I could not wish them to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 179 

be children of heaven ; neither could I make away their 
weakei' ones to hell ; they were all my fellows ; I could 
feel with them all, and love them all. For me this 
world was neither so high nor so low as the Church 
would have it ; chequered over with its wild light 
shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more 
dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light. " These 
many men so beautiful,'' they should be neither God's 
children nor the Devil's children, but children of men, 



Here ends this manuscript, abruptly. I know not what 
others may think of it . . . . , . . . To me, at 
least, as I read it it seemed as if my friend were work- 
ing round, slowly perhaps, but surely, to a stronger and 
more real grasp of life ; and, if he could only have been 
permitted some few months or years of further silent 
communing with himself, the reeling rocking body might 
have steadied into a more constant motion. But unhap- 
pily the trials of life will not wait for us. They come at 
their own time, not caring much to enquire how ready 
we may be to meet them .... and we little know 
what we are doing when we cast adrift from system. 
*'How is it," said Martin Luther's wife to him, ''that in 
the old Church we used to pray so often and so earnestly^ 
and now we can but mutter a few words a poor once a 



180 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

day, with hearts far enough away " Even 

saperstition is a bracing girdle, which the frame that is 
trained to it can ill afford to lose. 

Markham was beginning to find a happiness to which 
he had been long a stranger. With his books and his 
pen he was making a kind of employment for himself ; 
and, better perhaps than this, he was employing a know- 
ledge of medicine, which at one time he had studied more 
than superficially, much to the advantage of many pea- 
sant families, with which he made acqaintance in his 
rambles. In this way passed along the winter. He had 
rooms in a small cottage close to the water ; and with 
the help of a little skiff he had made for himseK, as the 
spring came on, and the sky and the earth put on their 
beauty again, the fair shores of the lovely lake unfolded 
all their treasures to him, and reproached him into 

peace A dreamer he was, and ever would 

be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take 
its turn with waking ; and even dreams themselves may 
be turned to beauty, by favored men to whom nature has 
given the powers of casting them into form. '' The 
accomplishment of verse " had not been granted to 
Markham ; but music was able to do for him what 
language could not, and the flute obeyed him as its 
master. Many an evening the peasants wandering home- 
wards along the shore had stood still to listen to sounds 
rising from the water which they little thought were 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 181 

caused by English breath ; and the nightingales took 
their turn to listen to notes as sweet and more varied 
than their own. After all, it is no sign of ill health of 
mind, this poAver of self-surrender to the emotions which 
nature breathes upon us. We are like the wind harp 
under the summer breeze, and we may almost test how 
far our spirits are in tune with hers by the vagrant 
voices they send forth as she sweeps across their strings. 
One evening late in May he was drifting languidly 
down the little bay which lay before his window ; the 
faintest air was slowly fanning him towards the land ; 
it was too faint even to curl the dreamy surface of the 
lake ; only it served to catch the notes which were 
rising from off his flute and bear them in fuller sweetness 
over the few hundred 5^ards of water to the shore. He 
had been lying in this way an hour perhaps or more, 
playing as the feeling rose, or pausing to watch the gold and 
crimson fading from off the sky, and the mellow planets 
streaming out with their double image in the air and in 
the lake. His boat drifting against the shore warned 
him at last to rise ; he sprung out, and drew it up beyond 
danger of the waves, and then for the first time observed 
that he had another listener besides the nightingales. A 
lady was sitting on the grass bank immediately behind 
where he was standing. It was too dark to let him see 
her face ; but, as she rose hastily, he perceived that 
she was young and her figure very elegant ; and it 



182 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

struck him that there wa.s somethino; En<:^lish about it. 
He took his hat off as he made way for her to pass 
him, and something seemed to pass between her lips, as 
if her involuntary admiration was melting into a half- 
conscious acknowledgement. He returned home, and the 
next evening, on coming in from a walk, he found on his 
table the card of a Mr. Leonard. He was the husband of 
the lady. She had sent him, it appeared, to make 
the acquaintance of a countryman whom she had recog- 
nized by the old English airs. 

Mr. Leonard was an easy, good-natured, not very sen- 
sible English country gentleman, whose fortune more 
than whose person had some years before induced a 
certain noble family at home to dispose of an incum- 
brance to him . . . . . in the form of a distantly 
related young lady who had been thrown upon them for 
support. She only knowing neglect where she was, and 
what of duty she had ever been taught being the duty 
simply of marrying well and early to gain an independent 
position, had no courage, perhaps no wish, to decline Mr. 
Leonard's proposals. Her personal beauty had been his 
attraction. She had married him, and ever since had 
been tolerating a sort of inert existence, which she did 
not know to be a wretched one, only because her heart 
was still in its chrysalis, and she had never experienced 
another. It could not have been with any active pleasure 
that she found hei'self chained for a life, to a person ahe. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 183 

was obliged to struggle not to despise, and glimpses now 
and then of some higher state would flash across her like 

a pang of remorse but, rare and fleeting 

as they were, they had passed by her like the strange 
misgivings which from time to time flit about us all of 
some other second life we have lived we know not 
where, and had happily been without the power to wake 
her out of her apathetic endurance. The Leonards had 
gone to Italy, as English people do go there ; she had 
longed to be taken there, because it w^as the land of art 
and poetry, and music and old associations — the land of 
romance and loveliest nature ; he, because it was the 
right thing to have been there ; because it would please 
his wife ; and because he was promised a variety in the 
sporting amusements which Avere his only pleasure. 

Ah ! if those good world educators, who in early life 
crush the young shootings of the heart, and blight its 
growth in their pestilential atmosphere, would but 
innaturate it with their poison and make it barren for 
ever ! how many a crime, as they are pleased to call it, 

would be spared But they only half do their 

work ; they cut off the fruit, but they leave the life 
remaining; to wake at enmity with all it finds, and to 
speak only to betray. The Leonards were to go to 
Rome in the winter; but for the hot months, as the 
style of friends whom he liked best to visit were not 
the sort which best suited her, and as she found the 



184 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

shores of an Italian lake a more agreeable retiring place, 
they came to a kind of a compromise. He took a villa 
near Como, which she and her young child were to make 
their home ; while he, who had many acquaintances 
received a dispensation from constant attendance, and 
was allowed to relieve the monotony by frequent absence, 
leavinof her in a solitude which, if the truth must be 
told, was more agreeable than his society, and only 
coming back to her now and then for a week at a time. 
He liked her very well, but a longer tete-a-tete after four 
years of marriage fatigued him. It was at one of these 
angel visits that she had seen Markham. They inquired 
who he was, and were told he was an Englishman, and 
out of health. She had learned something more of him 
in that evening music, which told her he was not a com- 
mon Englishman ; and Leonard, who had a theory of 
race, and believed with all his heart in the absolute 
virtue of everything English, was very happy to call 
upon him. The visit was retured. Markham was not 
quite a model Saxon, and illness too was a drawback, a 
certain rude health being part of the national idea ; 
but Leonard liked him well enough to make this week a 
fortnight ; and, at the end of it, their new friend had 
become so intimate with them, that under plea of his 
requiring attendance, and with the excuse that they had 
found out a number of common acquaintances at home 
which in Italy made them seem almost to have claims 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 185 

upon one another, they had begged him to leave his 
lodgings and make their house his home. 

It was the very thing for Leonard. He had an 
excuse now for going away ; while before he had felt 
some compunction at leaving his wife so much alone, 
however poor a companion he felt he could be for her. 
But a nice pleasant fellow who played the flute and 
talked poetry would far more than supply his absence ; 
and, with the honest English confidence which is almost 
stupidity, he rejoiced for his lady's sake at the friend 
which had been found for her, and now stayed away as 
he pleased without care or anxiety. 

Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which 
is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of 
sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not 
in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy 
is at once to be interesting. They never ask for others' 
sympathy with them ; they do not recognise their own 
troubles as of enough importance to any but themselves. 
But instinct teaches them their power ; they know what 
they can be to others ; they feel their gentle calling, and 

they follow it It is curious too, whether 

it be that people always admire most in others what they 
have the least in themselves — whatever be the reason — 
there is no kind of suffering in which they take warmer 
interest, than the heart's sufferings over intellectual 
perplexities. Many women have died of broken hearts, 



186 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

but no woman's heart ever broke in such a trial . . . 
. . . yet it is just those into which they are the least 
able to enter that they seem most to sympathise in. 
Whether it be that such a case is a rare exchange from 
the vulgar personal anxieties of common people, and they 
know that only a generous heart can feel deeply on a 
question in which all the world have as deep a stake as 
itself ; whether, the danger being said to be so great, a 
sceptic seems brave and noble to risk it for the 
love of truth — I cannot tell why it is, but I think 
no more dangerous person than Markham could have 
been thrown in the way of Mrs. Leonard. His con- 
versation was so unlike any she had ever heard before ; 
his manner was so gentle ; his disinterestedness in 
sacrificing his home, his friends, his fortune as it seemed 
to her, was so truly heroic — that he almost appeared like 
a being of another Avorld to her; and long before she 
had dared to think that her regard could be anything to 
him, she had at the bottom of her heart resolved that she 
would be all to him which others were not and ought to 
have been ; and in intending to be his sister, had already 
begun to love him more dearly than any sister. 

Their worst danger lay in their security ; neither of 
them had ever loved before, so that neither could detect 
the meaning of their emotions. If the idea of the possi- 
bility of his loving a married woman, as husbands love, 
had been suggested to Markham, he would have driven 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 1 

it from him with horror ; and she in her 

experience of marriage had had no experience of love ; 
she did not know into how false a life she had betrayed 
herself. She did not know that she was unhappy with 
her husband ; her unrest was but of the vague indefinite 
kind that rises in a dreary heart which feels that it 
might be happy, yet cannot distinguish what it requires 
to make it so. Poor thing, she v/as only twenty five ! 
Nature had bown the seeds in her of some of the fairest 
of her flowers, but had taken no care for their culture ; 
and they were lying still in the embryo, waiting for light 

and heart to wake them into life It were 

better they had been left to die unborn than that 
the light should have flowed in upon them from 
Markham. How can we help loving best those who 
first give us possession of ourselves ? All the day 
long they were together ; living as they did they could 

not help being so ; . only parting at 

night for a few short hours to dream over the happy 
past day, and to meet again the next morning, the 
happier for their brief separation. It was a new life to 
him: what had often hung before him as a fairy vision 
— what he had longed for, but never found; and here, as 
if sent down from heaven, was what more than answered 
to his wildest dreams. Now for the first time he found 
himself loved for himself — slighted and neglected as he 
had been .... suddenly he was singled out by a fasci- 



188 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Dating woman, who made no secret of the pleasure his 
friendship gave her. All along his life he had turned 
with disgust from every word which was sullied with 
any breath of impurity ; the poetry of voluptuous 
passion he had loathed. Alas ! it would have been 
better far for him if it had not been so. He would have 
had the experience of his fallen nature to warn him by 
the taste of the fruit which it had borne in others. 

Mrs. Leonard's little girl, too, was not long in discover- 
ing that he was her most delightful companion. It was 
easy for children to love Markham ; he knew how to 
abandon himself; and there they sat these two, the child 
the third ; the common element in which their hearts 
could meet ; Leonard seldom paid much attention to the 
little Annie, and she transferred her duty as well as her 
love to her friend ; and when she would wind her 
iingers into his hair as she sat upon his knee, and kiss 
him and call him papa, he could meet her mother's 
sweet smiling eyes with a smile as innocent and uncon- 
scious as her own. Through the heat of the day they 
stayed in the cool drawing-room. If Annie was sleep- 
ing, she would draw or work and Markham would read. 
He read well, for he read generally his own favorites 
which he knew, so that, unless she looked at him, the 
words fell from him as if they were his own. Nor 
less happy was she when, instead of reading, he would 
talk to her, and, never having known a willing listener 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 189 

before, would now pour out the long pent-up stream of 
his own thoughts and feelings. Weak Markham ! in 
the intense interest with which she hung upon his 
lips, he fancied he saw interest in the subject, which 
was only interest in himself 

In the evenings they would saunter down to the 
boat-house, and go out upon the lake. They seldom 
took a servant to row them ; it was more pleasant to be 
alone ; they felt it was, though they had not told them- 
selves why it was ; ah ! how near are two hearts 
together when they understand each other without ex- 
pression. 

They were both passionately fond of music. He always 
took his flute, .... she would sing when he was tired 
of playing, and each soon learnt to feign fatigue for the 
pleasure of listening to the other. 

It would be easy to linger over these scenes, yet 
they can give but small pleasure to us. Those two 
might be happy in them, only feeling themselves 
gliding along a sunny stream between flowery mea- 
dow banks ; but we, who hear the roar of the 
cataracts, can ill pardon the delirium which only listen- 
ing to the sweet voices of the present, holds its ears 

tight closed against every other So wise are 

we for each other .... while each one of us has his 
own small dream, too, over which he, too, is slumbering 



190 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

as foolishly as they, and is as much the mark of his wide- 
eyed neighbor's scorn. 

Week hurried after week ; when they met in the 
morning, they made their plans for the day, each sure 
that the other's pleasure was what each was most design- 
ing for. " lis commencaient a dire nous. Ah, qu'il est 

touchant, ce nous prononce par I'amour." 

And it was par I'amour. The altered tone of their voices 
showed it ; the hesitating tenderness of their glances 
showed it ; the hand lingering in the hand when it had 
far more than said its morning greeting or its evening 
parting ; and yet they did not know. ..... They 

will soon know it now The two metals 

are melting fast in the w^arm love fire ; they are softening 
and flowing in and out, vein within vein, a few more 
degrees of heat, and then . ... • -A month had 
passed, still Leonard did not return. Letters came instead 
of Leonard. He knew his wife was happy, he said : and 
as nothing made him so happy as to know that she was 
so, and as he could not add to it, he was going with 

Count to a castle in the Apennines. He would be 

absent another six weeks, or perhaps tv/o months ; 
when he would return finally to stay till their removal 
to Rome ; where Markham was to be persuaded to go with 
them. 

Markham had not been very well again. His chest 
had been troublesome ; he had caught cold from staying 



N 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 191 

too late upon the lake, and, tor a day or two, was unable 
to leave the sofa. One very hot afternoon, Mrs. Leonard 
had been up-stairs for some little time with Annie ; and, 
on her return, he was sleeping : she glided noiselessly to 
his side and sat down. Some few intense enjoyments are 
given us in life ; among them all, perhaps, there is none 
with so deep a charm as to sit by the side of those we 
love, and watch them sleeping. Sleep is so innocent, so 
peaceful in its mystery and its helplessness ; and sitting 
there we can fancy ourselves the guardian angels, holding 
oft* the thousand evils imagination paints for ever hanging 
over what is most precious, most dear to us. The long 
deep-drawn breathing ; the smile we love to hope is 
called up over the features by our own presence in the 
heart ; there are no moments in life we would exchange 
for the few we have spent by the side of these. What 
thoughts, in that long half-hour, passed through the 
lady's mind, I cannot tell. Markham felt that she was 
close to him ; he was vsleeping so lightly, that it was 
rather he would not than he could not rouse himself, to 
wake and break so sweet a charm. She was bending 
over him ; he felt her breath trembling down upon his 
lips ; her long ringlets were playing upon his cheek 
with their strange electric touches. As she gazed down 
so close upon him, she forgot her self-command ; a tear 
fell upon his face. He opened his eyes, and they 
met hers full and clear. She did not turn away ; no 



192 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

confusion shook into her features. She was but feeling 
how dear, how intensely dear he was to her ; and there 
was no room for any other thought. One arm was 
leaning over the end of the sofa behind his head ; the 
other had fallen down, and was resting on a cushion by 
her side. Her look, her attitude, those passionately 
tender tears, all told him the depth, the bewildering 
depth of her love. He caught the hand which lay beside 
him, and pressed it to his lips ; and, as it lay upon them, 
he felt it was not only his own which held it there. 
Dear, dear Mrs. Leonard, was all he could say. How 
poor and yet how full ! Not long volumes of love 
poetry and wildest passion could bear more of tenderness 
to the ear which could catch their intonation than these 
few words. Their lips formed no sound, orly they 
trembled convulsively. They wished, and they knew 
not what they wished ; a minute passed, another, 
another, and still he lay there unmoving, and she was 
kneeling at his side. Her hand was still clasped in his, 
and they felt each other's beating hearts in their wild 
and wilder pulsations ; from time to time the fingers 
closed tighter round their grasp, and thoughts they could 
not, dared not utter, thrilled through and through them. 
They did not utter them. It was something in the 
after-struggle to feel that at least no words, no fatal 
words, had passed. Their treacherous consciences cheat- 
ed them into a delusive satisfaction that as vet, at least. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 193 

they had not sinned. How long a time passed by they 
knew not, for time is only marked by change of thought 
and shifting feeling, and theirs was but one long-absorb- 
ing consciousness of a delicious present. 

But the change came at last. Interruption, not from 
within, but from the outer world which they had forgot- 
ten. Ah, Heaven ! that at such a moment such a 
messenger was sent to break the spell. There was a 
knock, and the door handle turned faintly ; she started. 
It was more, perhaps, from the instinctive delicacy which 
would hide its deepest feelings from common eye, than 
from any sense of guilt, and yet something, something 
shot through her she would have ill liked to explain to 
herself. She sprung up, and threw herself in a chair 
as the door opened; and little Annie came tottering in, 
came in bright and innocent, in there where the two 
friends were she loved so dearly, to hide her laughing face 
on the knees of mamma. 

It was more than Markham could bear. Far better 
he could have faced her husband in his anger — better 
have borne, perhaps, at that moment to have heard his 
summons to the judgment bar, than that bright presence • 
of unsuspicious innocence. He started from the sofa, 
and, holding his hands before his face, concealing himself 
from he knew not what, only feeling how ill it all was 
now with him, and seeming to meet the all-seeing Eye 
wherever his own eye fell ; he ran out of the room, and, 

M 



194 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

hurrying to his closet, flung himself in an agony upon 
his bed. The child looked wonderingly at him. 
^* Mamma," she said, " is Mr. Sutherland ill ? go to him, 
mamma — take me, and let us make him happy." Mrs. 
Leonard's tears burst in streams over her little face, 
from which she dried them off again with passionate 
kisses; and, flinging herself upon her knees, she prayed 
that Heaven would strengthen her and forgive her if she 
was doing wrong. 

And yet God helps not those v/ho do not help them- 
selves, and she had not the strength to fulfil her share of 
the condition. She hoped for strength to control her 
feelings, and yet she could not command herself to send 
the temptation from her. Twice she moved towards her 
writing-table : a note should go to Markham, and tell 
him, pray him, for both their sakes, to go away and leave 
her. Twice her heart failed. The third time the emotion 
rose, it was not strong enough to move her from her seat. 
And then insidious reason pressed up to urge a thousand 
arguments that it was far better he should stay. Both 
he and she knew themselves now : she knew him too 
well to fear that Markham was one of those men who 
themselves yielding to every emotion, think less of the 
woman who is only as weak, no weaker, than themselves. 
No, he was too human to have withdrawn his respect 
from her ; but they were on their guard now, and could 
never be in danger again. So sad, too, so lonely as he 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 195 

had been ; and now his health so delicate ; and she who 
had promised to be all to him which others should have 
been — she who, perhaps, alone understood him, and could 
sympathise with him. How could she, why should she 
send him from her ? Her husband, too, what reason 
could she give to him ? Why need it be ? Because she 
loved him — because he loved her. Surely that was a 
strange reason ; and, besides, they knew that before. 
Often and often they had said how dear they had become 
to one another. And now what difference? Because 
she would gladly have been more to him than she could 
be — because she felt (she did not deny it to herself) that 
she would sooner have been his wife than Leonard's. 
But why ? because they could not be all to one another, 
must they be as nothing ? Dear friends they had been, 
and might still be, and then — and then — there vfas some- 
thing cowardly in flying from temptation — mere tempta- 
tion. How far nobler to meet and overcome our feelings 
than basely to fly from them ! She had duties — dear 
duties — to Markham as Avell as to her husband; she 
would forget this afternoon, he would forget it, and all 
would be as it had been. 

There was something still which she had not explained 
— she had not satisfied : the last nerve of conscience 
which she had failed to paralyse still v/hispered it was 
all wrong — it was sophistry and madness ; but the dull 
unimpassioned voice was unheard among the voluptuous 



196 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

melodies of her wishes ; and like the doomed city, which 
shrunk from the voice of the prophetess, she pushed its 
warnings from her as idle superstition. 

When they met again at the tea table, all was not 
as it had been ; such as that it could never be again. 
Markham, too, in his silent room had felt that there 
was no safety for them but in parting ; and the same 
devil of sophistry had been at his ear whispering to 
him. He had long left off writing, even thinking ; 
that was over when he had ceased to be alone. He had 
been in the trial of life since then, where the sun and 
the wind had fallen upon his theories to test them. Alas! 
where were they ? Whirling like the sibyFs idle leaves 

before the passion gust Unequal to the 

effort of a final resolution, yet still forcing himself to do 
something, he made a compromise with his sense of duty. 
He would do a little if he would not do all, and he 
wrote to Leonard urging his return. Unable to give the 
real reason, he invented false reasons : he said his wife 
was delicate — he said that for opinion's sake it was 
better her husband should, by a more frequent presence, 
show, at least, his appr val of his own intimacy with 
her ; that he could not v.ige this upon her himself as an 
occasion for his own departure ; and, therefore, he had 
thought it better to write openly to him. In this way 
he satisfied himself that he had done all he need do, and^ 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 197 

let the future be what it would, he had ceased to be 
responsible. 

Fools, and blind! They might have read each the 
answer to their delusive pleadings, each in their common 
embarrassment. They were uneasy when alone ; their 
voices trembled as they spoke ; they made no allusion to 
the past ; they could net speak of it ; it would have 
been far better if they could. In open speaking and 
mutual confession then, there would, at least, have been 
a chance of safety for them ; their game w^ould have 
been all upon the board, and they would have taken 
counsel. We are often strong enough to persuade another 
against our own wishes, when we have ceased to be able 
to persuade ourselves. But this neither of them dared 
to begin to do. Perhaps it was impossible. Strange ! 
they fancied they intended to be less together, and yet 
their outer lives went on as before. They left oif for a 
few days saying " we,'' but their eyes said it with deeper 
tenderness than ever their lips had done. They shrunk 
openly from each other's gaze, yet each v/ould catch the 
opportunity, when the other's was turned away, to look as 
they had never dared to look before ; and now they could 
feel the glances which they did not see, thrilling through 
them like those on that memorable afternoon. Leonard's 
answer came. It was what Markham knew it would be 
when he wrote, though he had not confessed it to him- 
self : — '' He was sorry his wife was out of health, but 



198 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Markham was a better sick-nurse than he was; he would 
not hear of his leaving her. As to the world, what had 
the world to do with him ? He knew them both, and 
could trust them too well to let any such folly touch 
him ;" — and such other confiding madness as so of ten in 
this world makes love to ruin. 

And Markham did not go. He never thought of going 
now. His conscience was satisfied with what he had 
done. Unsteady as it was, and without the support 
which a strongly believed religious faith had once pro- 
vided for it, he experienced at last what so long he had 
denied, that to attempt to separate morality from religion 
is madness ; that religion, reduced to a sentiment resting 
only on internal emotion, is like a dissolving view, which 
will change its image as the passions shift their focal dis- 
tances ; that unrealized in some constant external form, 
obeying inclination, not controlling it, it is but a dreamy 
phantom of painted shadow, and vanishes before tempta- 
tion as the bright colors fade from off the earth when a 
storm covers the sun. 

Rather, in a mind like Markham's, unsupported as his 
mind was, there is no conduct to which these vague 
emotions will not condescend to adapt themselves, and 
which they will not varnish into loveliness. If there be 
one prayer, which, morning, noon, and night, one and all 
of us should send up to God, it is, '*' Save us from our own 
hearts ! " Oh ! there is no lie we will not tell ourselves. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 199 

The enchanted Armida garden of love ! — how like, how 
like it is to Paradise ! Dreams, delusion, fantastic prejudice 
it may be called, which a strong mind should spurn from 
it as a fable of the nursery — ay, should spurn — if it can. 
Are not ashes bitter on the tongue, though you bring 
proof in all the logic figures that they are sweet as Hybla 
honey ? /Vnd those pleasures which are honey-sweet to 
the first taste, is there not the sting with its venom-bag 
lying unseen ? Ah ! we know not ; we know not ; we 
know nothing. But something we can feel ; and what is 
it to us what we know, when we are miserable ? All 
men may not feel so. There are some who, as Jean Paul 
says, Mithridates-like, feed on poison, and suffer nothing 
from it ; but all tender hearts, who remember the feeling 
of innocence, will try long before they can reason away 
the bitterness out of pleasure which once they have 
believed not innocent. It is ill changing the creed to 
meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it 
seems, and refuses to be trifled with. 

Day followed after day, bringing with it what it was 
God's great will should be. I will not pause over these 
sad weeks of intoxicating delirium. If they did not fall 
as vulgar minds count falling, what is that to those who 
look into the heart ? Her promise of her heart's truth 
was broken ; and he loved her as he should not love ; as 
once, he would have loathed himself if he could have 
believed he could ever love the plighted wife of another. 



200 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

I will not judge them. Alas, what judgment could touch 
them is past and over now 1 

It is strange, when something rises before us as a pos- 
sibility which we have hitherto believed to be very dread- 
ful, we fancy it is a great crisis ; that when we pass it we 
shall be different beings ; some mighty change will have 
swept over our nature, and we shall lose entirely all our 
old selves, and become others. — Much as, in another way, 
girls and boys feel towards their first communion, or 
young men to their ordination, which mechanically is to 
effect some great improvement in them, there are certain 
things which we consider sacraments of evil, which 
will make us, if we share in them, wholly evil. Yet, 
when the thing, whether good or evil, is done, we find 
v/e were mistaken ; we are seemingly much the same — 
neither much better nor worse; and then we cannot 
make it out; on either side there is a weakening of 
faith ; we fancy we have been taken in ; the mountain 
has been in labor, and we are perplexed to find 
the good less powerful than we expected, and the evil 
less evil. 

Only, long after, when the first crime has begotten its 
children, and the dark catalogue of consequences follows 
out to make clear their parent's nature ; when in lonely 
hours we are driven in upon ourselves, and the images of 
our unfallen days come flitting phantom-like around us, 
gazing in so sadly, like angels weeping for a lost soul i 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 201 

when we are forced to know what then we. were, and, 
side by side with it, stands the figure of what we have 
become, it is then that what has passed over us comes out 
in its real terrors. Our characters change as world eras 
change, as our features change, slowly from day to day. 
Nothing is sudden in this world. Inch by inch ; drop 
by drop ; line by line. Even when great convulsions 
shatter down whole nations, cities, monarchies, systems, 
human fortunes, still they are but the finish, the last act 
of the same long preparing, slovdy devouring change, in 
which the tide of human affairs for ever ebbs and flows, 
without haste, and v/ithout rest. Well, so it was with 
Markham. This final fall of his was but the result 
of the slow collapsing of his system. His moral 
nature had been lowered down to it before he sin- 
ned ; he did not feel any such mighty change ; he 
was surprised to find how easily it lay upon him. 
Then, in the first delirious trance of happiness, he 
seemed to laugh to himself at his old worn-out prejudices. 
He had been worshipping an idol, which he had but to 
dare to disobey, to learn how helpless the insulted Deity 
was to avenge itself. He could still cheat himself with 
words. He had not yet heard the voice of God calling 
him. His eyes were opened, not as yet to evil, but only 
to find himself in a new existence, which he could even 
dream was a higher and a nobler one. And she— she — 
when a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time 



202 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every 
faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of 
the one feeling ; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the 
past, the future, they are names to her light as the 
breath which speaks them ; her soul is full. Markham 
was all these to her; her life, her hope, her happiness. 
Fearfully mysterious as it is, yet even love, which should 
never be, yet does not lose its nobleness ; so absolutely 
it can enthral a Avoman's nature, that self, that cunning- 
est of demons, is deceived, and flies before the counter- 
feit. Her love is all her thought, her care, her worship. 
To die for Markham would have been as delightful to 
Helen as the martyr's stake to a saint. I say it is a 
fearful mystery that, if love like theirs be what all men 
say it is, such heroism for it is possible. Yet, indeed, 
it is but possible for woman, not for man ; a man can 
give his entire soul to an idea, not to a woman — some 
second thought, even with the highest of us, and in the 
most permitted relation, will always divide his place 
with her; it is ever Abelard and Eloise; Eloise loves 
Abclard all; Abelard loves intellect and the battle of 
the truth. 

Well, on went the summer. They never looked 
forward, no thought of their guilt had yet intruded to 
disturb them. How could anvthins^ so beautiful be less 
than good. Even Annie, Markham could again bear 
upon his knee, and could laugh and tell her stories as he 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 203 

used to do. They took her with them in their rambles ; 
she was their boat companion in their lovely evenings 
upon the water, and once, when the poor child was 
suffering from inflammatory fever, no father could have 
watched more anxiously, no phj^sician more carefully 
put out his skill for her than he did. 

At last September came. The finger of love is ineffec- 
tual on the wheel of Time ; and though the summer was 
deepening in loveliness, the changing tints betrayed 
that they were but purchasing their beauty at the price 
of decay ; and now, as it grew clear that some change 
must come, something must happen soon, Markham be- 
gan to grow uneasy. In one month at furthest Leonard 
would return, and what was to follow then ? And his 
lips flagged in their eloquence, and the clouds be- 
gan to gather again about his face — and she saw 
them, and dimly read the cause, which she feared 
to ask. It was a beautiful afternoon. They had 
gone, he, she and Annie, to a distant island up the lake. 
They had taken a basket with them, and a few cold 
things, as they often did, and they were not going to 
return till the cool of the last daylight. The island was 
several miles away, and they had overstayed the time 
when prudence would have Avarned them homewards, in 
rambling about the place, and making sketches of an 
old ruined chapel, which on certain holidays was still a 
place of pious pilgrimage. It wanted still an hour of 



204 THE JSTEMESiS OF FAITH. 

dark when they re-embarked, and as a light warm air 
had sprung up, and Markham had taken a small sail 
with him, they still hoped they would be at home before 
it. Their anxiety was more for Annie than themselves. 
They had often overstayed the sunset, and laughed to 
find, when darkness came, how time had glided by with 
them : but Annie had been ill, and was still delicate. 
. . . . Well, the skilf was shooting away under the 
sunset; the purple sky above them, the purple wave 
below them ; they were sitting together in the stern, and 
Annie was scrambling about the boat, now listening to 
the rippling music of the water under the bow, now clap- 
ping her little hands in ecstacy at the lovely light flash- 
ing and sparkling with a thousand glorious colors in 
the long frothy wake the thin keel had carved along the 
surface. Markham told her to come over to them and 
sit quiet ; but they did not seem disposed to talk to her, 
and at last, under condition of her promising to be per- 
fectly still, he consented to let her stay by herself under 
the sail, fenced in with cushions. 

They were sad, those two, and, for a long time, silent. 
A painful unexplained uneasiness was hanging over both 
of them. Thoughts were playing across his mind which 
he feared to share with her for fear he might strike some 
unlucky chord. If, as has been said, it be true that 
things which concern us most nearly have an atmos- 
phere around them, which we feel when we are entering ; 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. ^ 205 

that, like birds before a storm, we are conscious of the 
coming change — perhaps it was another weight which 
was sinking down their spirits. 

At last, as when after we have been some time in 
darkness, our eyes expand, and objects slowly glimmer 
out before them into form, so their words began to flow 
out of the silence, and for the first time Markham spoke 
of the future. 

"Another month — and Leonard wdll return," he said, 
in a thick, half-stifled voice ..." and then T 

" I am yours, Markham," she said, " Dear Markham, 
you will never leave me ?" 

" Leave you ! Helen," he answered ; " never with my 
wall ; but it may not be mine to choose." 

" Oh ! yes, yes, it will, it shall. Do not think I have 
not thought of it. I know what 1 am going to do." 

He looked inquiringly at her. " Leonard must know 
we love each other, Helen. We could not, if we would, 
conceal it from him." 

" Conceal it ? Deceive him ?" she answered, proudly. 
" No, not if he was as base as he is noble-minded and 
generous. Never." 

" Well !" he said, hesitating. 

" Well," she answered ; " will, I well tell him all. I 
will throw myself at his feet, and ask his forgiveness ; 
not for loving you, but for ever having been his, That 



206 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

was my sin ; to promise I knew not what, and what I 
could not fulfil." 

Markham smiled bitterly. 

" I will tell him," she went on ; "I will tell him I 
never loved him ; only till I knew you I did not know 
it. I will do my duty ; I will be his servant, if he wishes 
it. I have done everything for him at home ; I will do 
all that, and far more than all — only as he cannot have 
my heart .... I .... I ... . Surely, 
if he cannot have it, my heart can be little to him if I 
give it to you." 

Poor, poor thing, when she had lived in the world she 
had still lived out of it, and turned a deaf ear to its 
voices. She had no idea what she was doing. Ill 
instructed as she had been religiously, her instinct had 
recoiled from the worldly instruction which she might 
have learnt as a substitute ; and she had no notion of 
right and wrong beyond what her heart said to her. 

'' That is what you think, Helen," Markham answered. 
" Now, I will tell you what I think. When you tell 
him what I am to you, he will kill me, and for you 



'' For me ; if it were so, I would die with you, Mark- 
ham ; we cannot live without each other. If we have 
broken this world's laws, and must die, then love will 
give us strength." 

Markham shuddered. " We might fly," he said. 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 207 

" Is it really certain that he will separate us, Mark- 
ham, as soon as he knows ?" 

" Certain," he answered. " Every man w^ould feel it 
his duty ; I should myself if I were as he is." 

'' Markham, Markham," she said passionately, " in all 
the world I have not a friend — not one ; till I knew^ you 
I never knew w^hat love, what friendship meant. There 
is none but you on whom I can lean ; there is none to 
whom I can turn even in thought. Teach me, Markham, 
teach me ; w^hat you tell me I will do." 

" There is no hope except in flight," he answered, 
huskily ; " If you will leave all for me, I can offer you a 
home, though but a poor one, and myself, in exchange for 
what you lose." 

She was silent ; her head hung down ; he could not see 
the tears which were raining from her eyes. 

" We shall do what the world forbids," he continued. 
" The world will punish us with its scorn. It is w^ell. 
When we accept the consequences of our actions, and do 
not try to escape from them, we have a right to choose 
our owm course, and do as we wall." 

The last w^ords scarce reached poor Helen's ear; her 
heart was far away. 

" Tell me, Markham," she said (and she turned her 
eyes, swimming with tears, full upon him) — "tell me, 
do not deceive me ; you know the world's ways, or some- 



208 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

thing of them. If I go with you, shall I ever see my 
child again ? " 

" I shall be all which will be left you then/' he answered, 
slowly. '' She is his child, and 

'' And her mother's touch would taint her ! Oh, no, 
no. Annie, my own darling. I cannot leave my child. 
No, Markham, no ; all but that. I cannot . . . ." 
She sunk her head upon his shoulder, and her breast 
shook as if her heart would burst its prison home. 

Unhappy lady, wretched Markham, the solving of their 
problem was nearer than they dreamed of. Look your 
last, poor baby, on that purple sunset. Turn, gaze out 
your full on your ill-fated mother. The angels are 
already cutting their swift way down the arch of heaven 
to bear away your soul. Yon mountain, whose snow- 
crusted peaks are melting into the blue of heaven, will 
again put on their splendour, and glitter crimson-flushed 
in the glories of the morning — but you will never see 
them more. One day, and yet another, and the sun 
which rises on your eyes will be the spirit's sun that 
lights the palaces of heaven when the blessed are in their 
everlasting home. Gaze on, gaze on upon your mother ! 
but a little, and then, it must be there, if ever, that you 
will meet her any more. The pure and innocent are 
there ; you may meet her there, for she loves you with a 
pure and holy love, and love unbroken here is never 
broken ther^, 



THE NEMESIS O^ FAITH. 209 

The breeze had fallen with the sunset. The 
crimson had melted off the clouds ; a few dissolving 
specks of gray about the sky were all that was left 
of the glorious vision, and through the purple air 
the evening star streamed down in its sad, pas- 
sionate, heart-breaking loveliness. The child had 
for a long time lain still, as she had been told. At 
last, tired of not being amused, she had crawled out 
from under the clothes in which they had wrapped her 
against the evening chill, and had begun to find amuse- 
ment for herself in looking over the boat s side, watching 
the rippling bubbles as they floated by ; and the images 
hanging in the depths, as if the water was a window 
through which she was looking down. It was so odd 
that the bubbles moved by, and the stars did not at all, 
but went along with them always so exactly in the same 
place. They were not observing her as they talked. 
The boat moved slower and slower as the surface of the 
lake grew still. The deep hum of the night beetle 
sweeping by sounded strangely on her ear. The moon 
rose up into the sky. The rays shone cold into her 
face, and the little thing shrunk and shivered, and yet 
she gazed, and gazed. There it was so close to her ; 
just under the boat's edge ; rolling and dancing on the 
wave that washed from off the bow. She could almost 
touch it, so near it was, a long rolling sheet of gold. 
She dipped her fingers into the water. It felt warm^ 

N 



210 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

deliciously warm, and, when she held up her hand, the 
wet skin glittered in the light. It was the water then 
that was so beautiful ; and if she could only reach the 
ripple it Avas all gold there. She leant over below the sail, 
and as she stretched out her hand her weight brought 
the boat's side lower and lower down ; just then a faint, 
a very faint momentary freshening of the air swept into 
the sail ; the gunwale sunk suddenly, and the water 
rushed up her arm into her chest. She started back. 
They saw her then, though they had not seen what had 
happened to her, and they told her to lie back again 
where she had been. She was quite wet; but the water 
seemed so warm and so pleasant, and they might scold 
her if she told, and she lay back, and did not tell them, 
and sunk asleep as she was. 



Two hours had passed, and now they were at home 
again, and in Mrs. Leonard's room. The child's wet 
clothes had been taken off her ; she was in her little 
bed, breathing thick and heavily. Markham was stand- 
ing by her from time to time, laying his finger upon 
her wrist, and Helen on her knees at the bedside, with 
her eyes fixed upon his face, and fearing to ask anything 
lest her ear should be obliged to hear what she already 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 211 

read there too plainly. The fever was gathering every 
moment. When they took the little thing out of the 
boat, she could not tell him coherently what had hap- 
pened to her, she could only moan out that she was very 
cold, and muttered something about the moon. Since 
she had been taken home she had not spoken, but every 
moment her forehead was growing hotter, her poor damp 
skin parched and dry, and her pulse quicker and more 
feeble. 

Presently she opened her eyes, and stared wildly round 
her. 

" Mamma, mamma," she cried. Helen leant over 
her, and kissed her burning cheek, but it did not seem 
as if Annie was calling her, or knew her, or saw her. 

" Mamma, mamma, pretty mamma, take me to you ; 
mamma, why cannot I come to you ? " 

" I am here, my own darling, my own child," Helen 
said. 

" You are not mamma. Go away, you are not mamma. 
There is mamma standing there, there, by the bed ; 
beautiful ! who is that in white ? why do you look at 
me so ? Yes, I wish to go, why can't I go ? There, in 
the pretty moonlight on the water." 

'* She is wandering," Markham whispered ; " she does 
not see — hush ! " 

" Where am I, mamma ? I was never here before. 
Where is it ? Is this heaven ? Where is God ? God is in 



212 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

heaven ; I don't see him, I only see light and flowers. 
Ah, it is all gone, dark, dark, dark." 

She shut her eyes alld rolled her head upon the pillow, 
moaning painfully. 

They had scarcely spoken yet, the other two. 

" Markham, tell me," said Helen, with a fearful calm- 
ness, '' is there any "hope ? " 

" God forbid that I should say there is none, Helen," 
he answered, slowly. 

" Well," she said, quickly, " tell me all, I can bear it." 

'' All that man can do is done," he answered ; " the 
fever will be at its height to-morrow ; till then I can tell 
nothing, we must leave her to God." It was all that 
passed between them. What more at such a time could 
they say, with this Heaven's lightning blazing before 
their eyes ? 

The night wore on ; the shadow of the heavy curtains 
crept slowly across the room ; the light was painful to 
them, they had buried it in a shade ; they had neither of 
them changed their dress, and, together, at either side 
the little bed, they sat out those awful hours. The room 
was deathly still; no sound but the heavy breathing 
of the child, and now and then some strange broken 
words, which her spirit was speaking far away, and the 
sinking body was but faintly echoing. There are some 
blows which are too terrible to paralyse us, and, instead 
of driving consciousness away, only waken every faculty 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 213 

into a dreadful sensibility. Nature has found a remedy 
for the heaviest of ordinary calamities in the torpor of de- 
spair; but some things are beyond her care, perhaps beyond 
her foresight. Perhaps, in laying down the conditions 
of humanity, she shrunk from seeing the full extreme of 
misery which was possible to it. We will turn in silence 
from Mrs. Leonard's heart : would to God she could have 
turned from it herself ! 

Once she raised her eyes to Markham ; the moonlight 
lay upon his features, and so ghastly pale they were 
that even the spectral light itself could lend them a 
warmer color. While there was anything left to do, so 
long his heart had left his mind undisturbed to act ; but 
now reflection woke again, and the past, the present, and 
the future shot before him in terrible review. Let 
Annie live, or let her die, he felt God had spoken to him, 
and he was slowly moulding in himself his answer. 
Was it the voice of warning, or the voice of judgment ? 
To-morrow would show. 

The morroYv^ came ; the sun rose and went his way 
so slowly he had not gone the long summer through; he 
sank down, and the evening fell upon the earth, and now 
the crisis was come. They had never left the room, they 
had taken no food, they had scarcely spoken to each 
other. From time to time Markham had turned to the 
child, had felt her pulse, and poured cooling medicine 
between her burning lips, and still life and death hung 



214 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

uncertain in the trembling balance. Mrs. Leonard had 
been lying for an hour, in the greatest exhaustion, on the 
sofa ; about six o'clock Markham woke her, and said, 
firmly, " The crisis is come now ; now sit here and watch 
her ; if at the end of another half hour she is alive, she 
will recover." He himself moved over to the opea 
window. There lay the deep, dark mountains, and the 
silver lake, the blue cloudless sky bending over them in 
unutterable beauty ; the young swallows were sweeping 
to and fro far up in their airy palace ; the pale blue 
butterflies were sauntering from flower to flower, and 
every tree was thrilling in the evening air with the 
impassioned melodies of the nightingales. Never, never 
since the sad wanderers flung their last lingering look on 
the valleys of that fair Eden from which they and all 
their race were for ever exiled, had human eyes yet 
gazed upon a lovelier earthly scene than that which now 
lay out before the window where Markham was stand- 
ing. Alas, alas ! when the heart is indeed breaking, 
with a grief beyond hope, beyond consoling, how agoniz- 
ing is the loveliness of nature ! It speaks to us of 
things we cannot reach. It mocks our fevered eyes 
with Tantalus visions of paradise, which are not for us ; 
floating before us like phantoms in a dream, and gliding 
from our grasp as we stretch our arm to seize them. 
It is well, yes, it is well, but it is hard for the bruised 
heart to feel it so. All, all nature is harmonious, and 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 215 

must and shall be harmony for ever ; even we, poor men, 
with our wild ways and frantic wrongs, and crimes, and 
follies, to the beings out beyond us and above us, seem 
doubtless, moving on our own way under the broad 
dominion of universal law. The wretched only feel their 
wretchedness : in the universe all is beautiful. Aj^, to 
those lofty beings, ba they who they will, who look 
down from their starry thrones on the strange figures 
flitting to and fro ovei' this earth of ours, the wild reck- 
lessness of us mortals with each other may well lose its 
painful interest. Why should our misdoings cause more 
grief to them than those of the lower animals to our- 
selves ? Pain and pleasure are but forms of conscious- 
ness ; we feel them for ourselves, and for those who are 
like ourselves. To man alone the doings of man are 
wrong ; the evil which is with us dies out beyond us ; 
we are but a part of nature, and blend with the rest in 
her persevering beauty. 

Poor consolers are such thoughts, for they are but 
thoughts, and, alas ! our pain we feel. Me they may 
console, as I think over this farce tragedy of a world, or 
even over the nearer sorrows of a friend like Markham 
Sutherland. For Markham himself, in this half hour — 
they were far enough from his heart. 

He was dreaming again of old times, of the old Mark- 
ham, once simple and pure as that poor dying child, who 
could once look up with trusting heart to his Father in 



216 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

heaven, and pray to Him to keep him clean from sin ; 
and his sick heart shrunk appalled from the wretched 
thing which he had become, and the gulf which w^as 
yawning under his feet. 

A cry from Helen roused him ; he collected himself 
rapidly, and moved across the room to her. Annie's eyes 
were open, the flush of pain had passed from off her 
face ; she knew them both, and was feebly trying to 
stretch out her little hands towards her mother. She w^as 
dying ; her eyes were glittering with a deep unearthly 
lustre from the visions on which she had been gazing 
They had but turned back for a moment, for a last good 
bye, and earth and all that was dear to her on earth 
would be lost then, to return no more. One look was 
enough for Markham ; he saw all was over, and he hid 
his face in his hands. " Good bye, mamma, I am going 
away ; good bye, don't cry, dear mamma, I am very 
happy." The heavy eyelids drooped, sunk, rose again 
for one last glance — her mother's image only was all it 
caught, and the light went out for ever. 

That last thought had traced the tiny features into a 
smile. It was the smile, the same sweet smile Mrs. 
Leonard knew so well, which night after night she had 
so often gazed upon, and had stood on tiptoe and held 
her breath lest she should break the sleeping charm. Ah i 
she may speak now loud as she will, and have no fear of 
breaking slumber deep as this. Still lay the little 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 217 

frame, still as the silent harp there before the 
window, but no cunning hand shall ever sweep those 
heart-strings to life ; their sweet notes shall never, never 
speak again. 

" It is over," Markham said, in a low voice. " She is 
in peace now. All-righteous God ! " 

Mrs. Leonard had flung herself upon the bed. 
The tears burst out, and fell in streams over her dead 
child's face. She drew it to her breast, where once its 
baby lips had gathered life and strength. Ah ! why may 
it not be again ? Her tears rained down, but they were 
not tears with which the bruised heart unloads the 
burden of its sorrrow, but the bitter, burning tears of 
bewildered agony. 

Her Annie, her darling ; all she had till she knew 
Markham ; she who had first made life delightful to her ; 
who had taught her heart first to love ; now dead, gone, 
torn from her ; and, oh ! worse, worse ; their own doing. 
How it was she did not know; but their fault it was. 
Her nature was too weak to bear so complicated a misery, 
and her mind broke into disorder. Surely, yes, surely, it 
must have broken, or thoughts like these could never 
have come to her now. 

She rose steadily, and walked up to Markham, and 
laid her hand upon his arm. 

" Markham," she said, " it is for my sin. Would, oh, 
would it had been myself, not she, who has been taken ! 



218 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

It is for my sin in marrying her father. It was an 
offence against earth and Heaven, and the earthly trace 
of it is blotted out, and its memory written in my heart 
in letters of fire. Now, Markham, if I am not to die 
too, take me aw^ay. I can never see him again." 

It w^ould be difficult to conceive words which at the 
moment could have shocked Markham more fearfully. 
He, too, had seen Heaven's finger in what had been ; 
but he thought it was a punishment for the sin which 
he had wished to commit — a stern and fearful interposi- 
tion to save him from completing it. Strange, too, that 
even with such thoughts, serious as they really were, it 
was not duty, it was not Helen, which was predominant 
with him, it was himself. Not so much that God would 
prevent a sin as that He would save him. Sceptic, 
philosopher as he was, this was what he made of it. 
On her it had come as a punishment for loving him, and 
for having allowed him to love her. 

" What, Helen; with your child dead before you ? at 
such a moment to speak of . . . of . . . what I 
dare not think of. Oh, Helen, Helen ! we must think of 
duty now. Think of your husband," 

" Markham," she said, with dreadful calmness, " these 
are strange words .... from you. Husband I 
have none. You taught me that I had none." '' And 
there,,, she added, pointing with her finger, " Is not there 
a witness too ?" 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 219 

" Oh ! this is too much/' Markham cried ; ''she is 
mad; I cannot bear it/' He rushed out of the room. 
His own teaching — with him but words — words in which 
feelings he now recoiled from, had fashioned themselves 
into a creed which he had but dreamt that he believed — 
and now coming back upon him so dreadfully. It is 
not so easy a business this turning back out of the 
wrong way. These words and deeds of ours we scatter 
about so recklessly find deeper holding ground than in 
our own memory. It is not enough to say I will turn 
and go back. What if I must carry back with me all 
those whom I have taken down ; if I have bound up 
their fate with mine ; if, after all, life be something more 
than these thoughts and feelings, and repentances — not 
altosfether that shadow of a world with which we have 
been playing. Others, besides unhappy Esau, find no 
place for repentance, though they seek for it ever so 
carefully. He hurried to his own room, and, shutting 
himself in and double-locking the door, he threw himself 
exhausted upon his bed. He had taken no food all day. 
Mind and body were worn to the last. He heard her 
step follow him. He heard her voice imploring him to 
speak with her; but for a moment if it must be, but still 
to speak to her. But he would not, he durst not ; and, 
giddy between weakness and excitement, he sunk into 
unconsciousness. He must have lain many hours as he 
was, for the day was breaking when he came to him- 



220 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

self again. He had lain down in his clothes; he rose 
weak and worn, and disordered, hut the heavy sense of 
wretchedness, which entered in with his returning 
consciousness left him no strength to collect or a^rrange 
himself. He opened the window, and looked out. A 
thick grey fog lay over the valley, but the air was cool ; 
he thought he would go out. He stole down the stairs. 
He paused opposite her door Twice he turned to enter. 
As often his heart failed him ; he feared to Gee the state 
in which she might be. He listened; he heard her 
breathing, and then glided noiselessly to the outer door, 
which he opened, and went out. The walk before him 
led down to the lake ; up that walk he had come the 
last time with her, and with one who would not pass 
that v/ay again. He followed it mechanically now, 
and wandered slowly along the shore. The tops of the 
mountains were showing out faintly above the mist, so 
quiet it was, still, so peaceful. Ah, it was little to him 
how it was with the fever in his own breast ; yet his 
mind was quick in catching every image which would 
add to his agony. Turn where he would, some dear spot 
fell upon his eyes round which a thousand passionate 
memories were encircled. There was the little bay 
where he first met her. There was his own little cottage 
with the jessamine twining about the windows, where 
till that hour, that fatal hour, he had dreamed of a 
happy home. And now Yet even the scenes of 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 221 

the love which he shrunk from were beautiful as he 
looked back. No unhallowed light seemed resting on 
them now, and in the shrine of the past they lay sad, 
and sweet, and innocent. Yes, all was beautiful, except 
the wretched present and his own most wretched self. 
What should he do ? Go with her. He thought of it ; 
yet he knew that he did not love her — that he had 
never truly loved her. He had felt remorse and sorrow 
for it ; and it would be as easy to- regret a prayer or a 
saintly action as to be sorry for having truly loved. 
Why, oh, why has love so many counterfeits, such 
cunning imitations ? No, he would not, even if his 
eyes had been opened to the sin — he would not fly with 
her. What future would there be for them — the world's 
outcasts — if love was not there to make the bitter cup 
more tolerable ? He could not hope again to weave 
around him the shadows of feeling to w^hich for the last 
three montlis he had surrendered himself. To forsaken 
truth, to neglected duty, we can return ; but tie up 
again the broken threads of a dream out of w^hich w^e 
have been awakened — never. 

He walked on along the lonely sands, his uncovered 
hair moist in the mornino- air, and the mornins: breeze 
playing coldly about his disordered dress. But sense 
was lost in the dreary wilderness of desolation which 
lay around his soul ; he only felt his misery, and 
pain would have been a relief to him. What should he 



222 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

do ? Go back to Helen ? How go back ? How bear to 
look on her again ? Never, oh, never. It could not be. 
He feared to look upon his work. He feared to hear 
the voices moaning round the ruin which he had made 
— to hear — to hear (was she mad, or was it his own self 
that spoke) — to hear his own teaching echoed back 
to him ; the monster to which he had given birth, and 
which now haunted him instinct Avith a spectral vitality. 
To see again that unhappy lady who, till she knew him, 
had been happy in a child whom she loved, in a husband 
whom she was ignorant that she did not love ; and who, 
now that his accursed star had shed its baneful light 
upon her, in three little months, ere the leaves which 
were then bursting into their young life had turned to 
decay, was husbandless, friendless ! Oh ! and most of 
all dreadful, her child too. He could not leave her that 
. . . . gone, all gone ; and he had done it. To leave 
her there, he knew it too well, was to leave her to die. 
And yet he must leave her. Himself, which was all that 
remained to her, that too he must tear away. And then, 
in these wretched hours, his wasted life came back upon 
him ; his blighted hopes, his withered energies — a curse 
to himself, he had been the grief of his family — of his 
friends ; of all who should have been most dear to him. 
There was a mark upon him ; a miserable spell, a moral 
pestilence, which made him his own hell, and tainted 
whatever he approached. And now at last, when one 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 223 

had been found Avho loved him, loved him with a passion 
he dared not think of, this one he had destroyed for 
ever. What business had such a thing as he, " crawling 
between earth and heaven," with such a trail behind 
him ? If it was better that the murderer should die, 
than remain in the society to which he was a curse ; if 
it were better for any beings whose presence makes the 
misery of their fellow-creatures, that they perish from 
off the earth where they never should have been ; then 
surely it were better far for him. ^ What future was there 
to which he could look forward ? As was the past time 
so would the coming be. The Ethiopian does not change 
his skin. The slimy reptile which has left its track 
along the floor will not, for all its own care or others' 
chiding, lose its venom, and become pure. He was 
infected with the plague. Earth was lost to him. 
Heaven was a di'eary blank. One by one, as he had 
wandered in the wilderness of speculation, the beacon 
lights of life had gone out, or sunk below the horizon. 
He only knew God by this last lightning flash, which 
had but shown him the abysses which environed him, 
and had left his senses more bewildered than before. 
Death, as he dwelt upon it, grew more and more alluring . 
Years before the thought of destroying himself had 
floated before him as a possibility; and with a kind 
of strange, unexplained impulse, by which our deeper 
nature, like that of animals, unreflectingly foresees 



224 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

its future necessities, he had provided himself with a 
deadly poison, which he always carried about his per- 
son. As he drew it out and gazed upon it, more 
and more clear it seemed to him that here was the goal 
to which all was pointing. Round this one light every 
shadow seemed to vanish. So he would expiate his sin. 
So perhaps Helen's life might be saved. It would be 
easier for her to bear to know that he was dead, than to 
feel that he had either deceived or forsaken her, or to 
hope on in a restless anguish of disquietude. At any rate, 
as it was his life which had worked her ill, his life 
should be no longer ; and so at least she would have a 
chance. For her, for all his friends to whom he had 
caused so much sorrow — for all those whom if he lived 
on he might hereafter meet and injure — oh ! for all, it 
was far, far the best. For himself, one of two things he 
would find in the grave : either as that bodily framework, 
out of which such inharmonious life discords had arisen, 
became unstrung and lifeless, the ill music that had 
poured from it would die away, and its last echo be for- 
gotten, the soul with the body dissolve for ever into the 

elements of which it was composed or else, if what he 

called his soul, his inward being, himself was indeed 
indissoluble, immortal, and in some sphere or other must 
live, and live, and live again, then he would find another 
existence where a fairer life might be found possible for 
him. At any rate it could not be worse. No, not 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 225 

that dark sulphurous home of torture, at the name of 
which he had once trembled, not hell itself, could be less 
endurable than the present . . . . . There at least 
he would not do evil any more, he would only suffer it ; 
and the keenest external agony which could be inflicted 
upon him he would gladly take in change for the torment 
which was within him. His mind grew calmer as it grew 
more determined. It is irresolution only, the inability 
from want of power, or will, or knowledge, to determine 
at all, which leaves us open to suffering : resolution, how- 
ever dreadful, determined resolution to do something, 
restores us at once to rest and to ourselves . . . . . 
At first he thought the moment of the determination 
might as well be the moment of the act. Himself con- 
demning himself to die, and his own executioner, with 
the means ready in his hands, he need not leave himself 
an interval of preparation. Why bear his pain longer 
when £e could at once leave it ? But the intensity of 
his determination he felt presently had itself relieved 
him. As it was to be done judicially, it should be done 
gravely and calmly. He would set his house in order, 
and write a last letter to Helen, undoing as far* as he 
could his own fatal work, and praying for her last 
forgiveness. 

The sun had long risen ; he had walked many miles, 
and, as the strain upon his mind grew lighter, his body 
began to sink and droop. At no great distance from 
o 



226 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

where he found himself, he remembered, was the cottage 
of a peasant with whom he had some acquaintance, and 
to whom, in the last winter, he had been of considerable 
assistance in curing him of a dangerous illness. 
There he thought he would go and remain for a few 
hours till he had rested and refreshed himself. He 
dragged himself painfully to the door ; it was open, and 
he went in without knocking. The man was at home, 
and started at the strange intruder so suddenly present- 
ing himself; scarcely less surprised was he when he 
discovered who it was that lay under all that disorder. 

" Holy Virgin !" he cried ; " Signor Sutherland, what 
has happened to bring you here like this ? " 

Markham was generally so scrupulous in his dress ; 
and, now he had no hat, his long hair was hanging 
matted over his face, his cheeks were sunk and hollow, 
and his eyes bloodshot from long care and watching. 

" It is nothing," he said ; " only I have been walking 
long, and am tired. If you will let me have something 
to eat, and a bed to lie down and rest on for a few 
hours ; and if you, in the meantime, will go yourself 
into Como for me, I shall thank you." 

'' To the world's end I will go for you, Signor, but 
what ?" 

" Do not ask me any questions," Markham said ; " but 
go for me, and do what I shall tell you, and you will be 
doing me a service." 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 227 

The man stared, but said nothing more ; and, while 
his wife busied herself to get their strange guest's break- 
fast, he made ready for his walk. 

Markham sat down and wrote three notes ; one to his 
banker with directions for the payment of a few bills 
left unsettled in the town, and desiring them to make 
over what remained of his money in their hands to some 
public charity. The second was to the people of his 
old lodging. His clothes, and anything else they had of 
his, they were to keep for themselves ; but his books 
and manuscripts were to be packed together and sent to 
England to myself. He himself, he said, was going 
away, and it was uncertain when he might return. The 
last was to Helen : brief and scrawled with a shaking 
hand, and blotted with his tears. It was only to say 
that he was gone : he w^ould write once more, but that 
she would never see him again. This one was to be left 
at the gate of the villa, and the man was to hurry on at 
once, without asking or answering any questions. As 
soon as the notes were despatched, he took some food 
and then threw himself on a bed in the inner room, and 
fell at once into a deep unbroken sleep. 

Como w^as not many miles distant ; the messenger soon 
reached it, and finished his commissions ; these were 
difficulties more easily overcome than his curiosity at the 
mysterious visit. He was leaving the town again with- 
out any acquaintance having fallen in his way to whom 



22S THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

he might chatter out the wonder that disturbed him, 
when he encountered the priest at whose confessional he 
was occasionally present. He saluted him respectfully, 
and the father stopped him to ask some trifling question. 
It encouraged him to relieve himself. His listecer knew 
Markham's name well ; he had often heard of his little 
acts of kindness in the neighborhood, and had more than 
once seen him and been struck with his appearance. He 
knew that he had been living for some months at the 
Leonards' ; and when he heard of his strange appearance 
in the morning, of the note which he had sent, and of 
the way in which it was to be given, the father felt 
that there w^as some connection between the two things, 
and that a mystery of some painful kind was hidden 
under them. 

" Ah ! father," the man said, '' there is something on 
his mind, I know there is, or his sweet face would 
nev^er have that awful look upon it. Perhaps he is 
mad, and the Devil has hold of him. If you would but 
come. 

" It is no place for me," was the answer. " He is a 
heretic and an Englishman. I could do nothing." 

" Oh, but, father," the peasant said, " it is not an 
outcast that he can be, so good and so young ; and last 
winter when the hunger came and the fever, and I was 
like to die with them, and I prayed to the virgin to help 
me, she sent the English signor to me, and he gave me 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 229 

food and money, and he drove the illness away ; and 
it cannot be that she would employ in that way a lost 
heretic." 

The priest thought a little while ; suddenly something 
seemed to strike him. " To-day," he said, " yes, it was 
to-day, he was to come." He took a letter out of his 
pocket, and read it rapidly over. " He will pass through 
Como on the 10th on his way to Rome ; we have 

directed him to St. , where you will not fail to see 

him." It may be so ; yes, he may be here now, and so 
something might be done. He continued to mutter 
indistinctly to himself, and telling his companion to fol- 
low him, walked rapidly to the monastery at the upper 
end of the town. 



Late in the afternoon Markham awoke ; he inquired 
whether the man was come back from Como, and, on 
learning that he was not, he sat down again at the table, 
and, with his purpose steady before him, wrote his last 
good-bye to such of us as cared to receive it. There was 
one letter to myself, enclosing another to his father, 
which I was to give him. This last I might read if I 
pleased ; it was very short, but a generous, open-minded, 
affectionate entreaty to be forgiven all the pain which he 



230 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

had caused him. I, he told me, would receive his manu- 
scripts from Italy. If I thought, he said in his bitter 
way, that he was one of Bishop Butler s favorites, the 
end of whose existence was only to be an example to 
their fellow-creatures, I might make what use I pleased 
both of them and of what I knew of his life. He had 
before written to me about Helen, and, giving me a 
rapid summary of what had passed, added that I should 
understand the conclusion. It was all over, he thought, 

as he was writing — As I read over those last 

letters now, I could almost wish that his purpose had 
been fulfilled as he designed it ; but I will not 
anticipate. 

The most painful thing was yet to be done : he must 
write a few last words to Helen. They never reached their 
destination ; either from inadvertance or from nervous- 
ness, he forgot the direction, and this letter was sent 
with the other to me. The hand was steady at the be- 
ginning, as if he had nerved himself for a violent effort ; 
but his heart must have sunk as he went on. Many words 
were written through the blots of tears, and the end is 
scarcely legible. 

" Helen," he wrote, " you have reason to hate me ; yet 
you will not when you read this, for, by that time, I 
shall have made my last expiation to Heaven and to you. 
Yesterday I thought of myself, and I wished I had never 
seen you. Now I see my own littleness too plainly to 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 231 

care what might have been my fate. But, O Helen ! 
would to God you had never seen me. We have been to 
blame. If you do not feel it, yet believe it, for me — for 
my sake ; it is all you can do for me now. Believe it, and 
forgive me. You forgive me ; I do not forgive myself till 
my life has paid for my unworthiness. Forgive me and 
forget me ; I never deserved your love ; I do not deserve 
your remembering. I never really loved you; a heart 
like mine was too selfish to love anything but itself. I 
did but fall into a dream, and I tempted you into it 
waking ; the fault was all mine, let my sacrifice suffice. 
I will not tell you to be happy now— that cannot be after 
what you have lost. But it is not for nothing that God 
is visiting you : and if he has taken Annie from you, and 
taken me from you, it is for your sake, that He may win 
you for himself. Turn, then, oh, turn ! there you will 
find peace, and pray for yourself and pray for me. And 
it may be — it may be — Helen ! pray that it may be, 
that in a little while — but a little — when your body 
will lie down in the dust by the side of ours, 
that our spirits may meet again, when I may be 
better worth your loving, and where love shall be no sin ; 
and the peace we have lost here shall be given us there 
for ever. 

" Farewell ! forgive me— farewell ! " 



232 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

Not far from the cottage on the shores of the lake, 
was a spot where human hands had piled together a few 
old massive stones, and a stream of v/ater, perhaps with 
some assistance, had scooped a basin in the granite. It 
was said that, many centuries before, a man had made a 
home there who was haunted by some strange sin ; and 
the worn circle which was traced into the hard surface of 
the rock was still pointed out as the sign of the victory 
of penitence. It had been worn by the painful knees of 
a subdued and broken-hearted man, whose long watches 
the stars for thirty years had gazed upon, and whose 
prayers the angels had carried up to heaven ; and fast 
and penance, and the dew and the rain, and the damp 
winds, had cleansed the spots from off the tainted soul, 
and God's mercy before he died, had hung round him the 
white garments of a saint. It was a holy place ; the 
peasants crossed themselves as they passed by, and 
stopped, and knelt, and prayed the pardoned sinner's 
intercession for their sins ; and a small rude crucifix, 
carved, it was said, out of the very wood of Calvary, 
stood yet over the old stone which had been the altar of 
the tiny chapel. What strange attraction drew Suther- 
land's steps there, it would be hard to say ; whether it 
was that, in this forlorn and desolate ruin, this poor 
wretched remnant of a worn-out creed seemed to find a 
sympathetic symbol of his own faith-deserted soul — or 
whether it was some more awful impulse, like that which 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 233 

haunts blood-guilty men, and, compelling them to their 
own self-betrayal, forces them to hang spell-bound round 
the scene of their crime, as if the forsaken faith could 
only fitly there revenge itself on the same spot which once 
had witnessed its victory — I know not — or perhaps the 
threads which move our slightest actions are woven of a 
thousand tissues ; and all these and innumerable others 
drew him there together. He sat down upon the broken 
wall. The ripple of the lake was curling and crisping 
on the pebbles at his feet. The old familiar scenes in 
the distance around him, so quiet and so beautiful — far 
away a white sail was glittering in the sunlight — happy 
human hearts were beating where that sail was, bound- 
ing along their light life way, with wings of hope and 
pleasure. Nearer still the island, the fatal island, and the 
treacherous water, and, last and worst, he could see the 
trees which hid the house where Helen was now lying — 
the lost, desolate Helen — alive or dead he knew not, he 
hardly cared, when life could be to her but living death. 
The scene hung on upon his senses ; but soon it was but 
floating on their surface, and his mind turned in upon 
his memory, and year by year, scene by scene, his entire 
life rose up before him, and rolled mournfully by. His 
love had been but a passing delirium ; she had never had 
all his soul ; and now what had the truest hold on his 
affections, — old home, and the old church bells, and his 
mother's dying blessing, came echoing sadly back^again. 



234 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

And yet the storm v/as past. He was calm now, for he 
was determined. Tears were flowing fast down his 
face ; but they were not tears of suffering, but soft 
tears, in which all his soul was melting at this last adieu 
to life, which poisoned as it had been for him, he could 
not choose but love. He did not regret his purpose ; 
he did not fear to die. Death must be some time, what- 
ever death was. But it was the very death which was 
so near, which seemed to have taken off* the curse 
from what he was leaving, as if the dawning light of his 
expiation was already breaking over the darkness. He 
took the phial from his pocket, with a steady hand he 
untied the covering, and poured its contents into a little 
cup ; he put it down upon the stone. So clear, so inno- 
cent, it sparkled there. ''Now for the last, then," he said. 
Once more he turned his eyes to the blue heaven, and round 
over the landscape so beautiful, so treacherously beauti- 
ful. A thin white cloud was sailing slowly up towards 
the sun. We often fix our resolution by the aid of other 
actions besides our own. The cloud should give the 
signal for his going. It would but veil the sunlight for 
a moment ; but in that moment a shadow would fall 
down on his spirit, which would pass away no more. 

'* All is over now then," he said, " and to this fair 
earth, and sky, and lake, and woods, and smiling fields, 
and all the million things which gambol out their life in 
them, now good bye, and for ever. You will live on ; 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 235 

and the wind will blow, and men will laugh and sigh, 
and the years roll along, with their great freights of joy 
and sorrow ; but I shall hear their voices no more. One 
pang, and I shall be lying there, among those old stones, 
as one of them. Little happiness, at best, there is, with 
all this fair seeming. A little — but a little — but I shall 
not be here to make that little less. A few friends may 
be sorry for me when they hear of this last end ; but 
their pain will be brief as mine, and the wound will heal, 
and time will bear away its memory ; and for me no 
mortal heart will suffer more. Farewell, Helen ! last 
witness that earth had no deeper curse than love of me. 
Your spirit is broken ; but peace may breathe over its 
ruins when I am gone. Farewell, farewell ! The shadow 
steals over the earth. I see it ; the dark cloud spot 
rolling down the hill so fast, so fast. Oh ! may it be a 
true emblem — the one dull spot in the^ great infinity of 
light ! These stones, this altar, they have echoed to 
sorrow deep, perhaps, as mine ; and faith in this poor 
atom, poor carved chip of rotting wood, cheated the 
sufferer into a lengthened agony of years. Miserable spell 
that clings around us ! we can but pass from dream to 
dream ; but change one idol for another ; and place the 
very Prophet who came to free us, on the pedestal from 
which he had thrown down the image. 

Another moment — he raised the poison. " And Jesus 
Christ died on this ?" he said, as his eyes lingered on the 



236 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

crucifix, " died for our sins .... so I die to 
lighten others' sorrows, and to end my own !" 

"Die without hope — the worst sinners worst death 
— to bear your sin, and your sin's punishment, through 
eternity !" 

Was it the rocks that spoke ? It was a strange echo. 
Markham started. The cup sunk upon the altar stone. 
His pulse, which had not shaken before, bounded vio- 
lently in his heart, as he turned and looked round him. 
And the figure he saw, and the glance he met, was 
hardly calculated to give him back his courage. How 
well he knew it ! How often in old college years he had 
hung upon those lips ; that voice so keen, so preter- 
naturally sweet, whose very whisper used to thrill 
through crowded churches, when every breath was held 
to hear ; that calm grey eye ; those features, so stern, and 
yet -so gentle ! — was it the spirit of Frederick Mornington 
which had been sent there, out of the other world, to 
warn him ? Was it a dream, a spectre ? What was it ? 
Oh ! false, how false, that a man who is bold to die, is 
bold for every fear ! Markham's knees shook ; his hair 
rose upon his head, and his tongue hung palsied in his 
throat, as he struggled to speak. 

'' God sent me here to seek one who might be 
saved. He did not tell me I should find Markham 
Sutherland !" 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 237 

" What are you ? " stammered Markham. " How came 
you here V 

"I have come in time/' he answered, cutting every 
syllable in the air with his clear impassive voice, as if he 
was chiselling it in marble. 

Markham's confused sense began to remember. Mr. 
Mornington had been for two years in Italy, washing 
off, in a purer air, the taint of the inheritance of 
heresy. 

" Come with me," he said, with the manner which 
knows it is obeyed ; " you must not stay here ; " he 
crossed himself ; '' the place is holy ! " He took the 
poison-cup from the stone, and threw it far away, 
and, with water from the fountain, he sprinkled the 
place where it had lain, and where Markham had JDeen 
sitting. 

The young man watched him mechanically. This 
last action did not escape him ; he was infected, and 
what he touched he tainted. He made no effort to 
resist. He who had but a few moments before philoso- 
phised over superstition, was feeble as a child. Again 
he saw in this the finger of Heaven, which he could not 
choose biit obey. 

Mr. Mornington moved out of the consecrated ground, 
signing to him to follow ; and he went without hesitat- 
ing. Partly it was the reviving of the power with 
which, in earlier years, this singular person had fasci- 



238 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

nated him ; partly it was his guilt-subdued conscience, 
which felt that it had forfeited the right to its own 
self-control. When they were outside the circle that 
marked the holy ground, his companion turned to him 
with features which had lost half their sternness, and 
had softened into an expression of tenderness and 
feeling. 

" And is it indeed you, Markham, you, I find here in 
this dreadful way ?....! spoke sternly to you. 
I could not speak otherwise there. But, Markham, I do 
not forget: I can be your friend as a man, if I cannot 
be more to you. Dear Markham, it was not a chance 
which sent me here ; I was told I should find an English- 
man, and an unhappy one. As an English priest my 
duty brought me here, and I come to find you, Markham, 
you on the very edge of a precipice so fearful, that it is 
only now that I have led you from it, that you or I can 
feel its awfulness ; and I feel — yes, and you feel — it was 
not an accident which ruled it so." 

Markham's heart was bursting. " Dear kind Mr. 
Mornington," he said, " you do not know" what you 
have done. It would have been better if you had left 
me ; yon may think so when you hear all thaji I will 
tell you." 

Mornington's softening face grew softer ; he knew 
the virtue of confession ; he knew that only a broken 
heart would turn to it unconstrained, and how soon the 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 239 

broken heart may become a contrite one. That day 
Markham told him all, first this long dark story, the 
last load which lay the heaviest upon him ; then, as he 
began to rise from under the weight, he saw more clear- 
ly, or thought he saw, how fault had followed fault, and 
one link hung upon another ; and step by step he went 
back over his earlier struggles, his scepticisms, his feeble 
purpose and vacillating creed, all of them outpouring 
now as sins confessed. His listener's sympathies were so 
entire, so heartfelt, he seemed himself to have passed 
through each one of Markham's difficulties so surely he 
understood them. Nay, often the latter was startled to 
find himself anticipated in his conclusions, and to hear 
them rounded off* for him in lano^uao^e after which he 
himself had been only feeling. At last it was all over. 
The inexpressible relief he felt seemed to cry to him of 
reconciliation and forgiveness. Mr. Mornington pressed 
but little upon him ; his heart was flowing, the wound 
had burst for itself, and had no need of urging. When 
it was finished, he said, '' Markham, I have heard you as 
a friend, I have only to ask you whether your conscience 
does not tell you that you have found a way at last 
where you thought there was none, and whether you are 
prepared to follow it ? '' 

" Oh, yes — yes," he said. 

" But to follow it now ? now while your heart is warm 
and the quick sense is on you of what you are and of 



240 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

what you were." Again Markham passionately profess- 
ed his readiness. 

Then you will repeat to another what you have 
confided to me ; not as I have heard it, but under the 
sacred seal of confession; you will undertake the pen- 
ance which shall be laid upon you ; and you will look 
forward with steady hope to a time when you may be 
received into the holy church, .and may hear your absol- 
ution from her lips ? - 

If Markham hesitated, it was but for a moment. Mr. 

Mornington went on " Your philosophy, 

as you called it, taught you to doubt whether sin was not 
a dream ; you feel it now ; it is no dream, it is a real, a 
horrible power ; and you see whither you have been led 
in following blindly a guide which is but a child of the 
spirit of evil. 

How true is it that arguments have only power over 
us while the temper is disposed to listen to them ! Not 
one counterfact had been brought before him, not one 
intellectual difficulty solved, yet under the warm rain of 
penitence the old doubts melted like snow from off his 
soul. He felt his guilt, he felt that here that dreadful 
consciousness might be rolled away, and as idle he thought 
it would be to stand hesitating with frozen limbs with a 
fire within sight and within reach, till some cunning 
chymist had taught him why the fire was warm, as 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 241 

to wait now and hang aloof till the power which he 
felt was explained to him. 

Whether all along below his weakness some latent sup- 
erstition had not lain buried, which now for the first time 
broke out into activity, or whether he mistook the natural 
effect of having unloaded his aching conscience in a 
kind listener s ear, for a supernatural spiritual strength 
which was flowing down upon him from heaven, or 
whether it was indeed true that his reason had gone 
astray ; that reason is by some strange cause perverted, 
and of itself and unassisted it can but present a re- 
fracted image of the things of the spirit with every line 
inclining at a false angle ; and that the strange Inexpli- 
cable sense which contradicts reason (for we cannot flinch 
from the alternative) is the one faithful glimpse and the 
only one of the truth of God, enough for our guidance 
and enough to warn us against philosophy — were ques- 
tions which long after, in his solitary cell, the unhappy 
Markham was again and again condemned to ask himself, 
and to hear no answer, except in the wild rolling storm 
of eager angry voices calling this way and that way, and 

each crying down the other But there 

was no such hesitating now. The overpowering acute- 
ness of his feeling unnerved what little intellect was left 
unshaken, and the gentleness and fascination of Mr. 
Mornino^ton held him like a mao^netic stream. He did 
all they bid him do ; for a time he felt all they promised 



242 TEE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

that he should feel. He felt that it was his doubt 
which had unhinged him ; he had fallen because his 
moral eye had become dim. Deep as his sin had been, 
Mr. Mornington told him it was not mortal, because it 
had been uncompleted ; saints had fallen, the man after 
God's own heart had fulfilled as deep or a deeper crime. 
If he could submit himself utterly and unreservedly to 
the holy church, the church in God's stead would accept 
him and would pronounce his full forgiveness. 

He confessed, and after undergoing the prescribed pen- 
ance, he received the conditional baptism, w^as absolved, 
and retired into a monastery. Once, and once only, his 
human feeling was strong enough to make him speak 
again to Mr. Mornington of Helen, and to ask what had 
become of her. But a cold severe answer that she was 
cared for, and a peremptory command never to let 
his thoughts turn upon her again (with a penance for 
every transgression) until those under whose care he had 
been placed could give him hopes that his prayers might 
be offered for her unsullied by any impurity — together 
with the severe rule of discipline under which he had, 
by his own desire, been laid — for a time at least drove 
her out of his mind. His crushed sense became paralys- 
ed in the artificial element into which he had thrown 
himself. His remorse overwhelmed his sympathy with 
her She belonged to the old life which he 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 243 

had flung off, and he endeavored only to remember her 
in an agony of shame. 

Poor Helen ! she was cared for. How that night and 
those days passed with her was never known. Mark- 
ham's note was brought her the morning of his disappear- 
ance, and she knew that he too was gone when all else was 
gone — gone ! — lost to her for ever ! It swept over her 
lacerated heart like the white squalls over the hot seas 
of India, with a fury too intense to raise the waves, but 
laying them all flat in boiling calm. It appears she 
collected energy enough to write to Mr. Leonard, desiring 
him to come to her at once. She gave no reason — she 
did not even tell him that his child was dead ; only he 
must come to her, come on the instant. When he came 
lie found her in a state of almost unconsciousness. Her 
nerves were for the time killed by what she had gone 
through ; but when she saw him she was able to gather 
herself up. She knew him — she knew what she had to 
say to him ; and coldly, calmly, and gravely she told 
him all. There were no tears, no passionate penitence, 
no entreaties for forgiveness. Her words fell from her 
like a voice from the shadowy dead sent up out of their 
graves on some unearthly mission; and they awed him as 
such a voice would awe him. His rude and simple 
nature might have broken into passion had he seen one 
tinge of shame, or fear, or any feeling which he would 
have expected to flnd. He had never loved her, though 



244 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

he thought he had. Perhaps he was too shallow to love. 
But he might have felt real rage at his own injury, and 
he might have persuaded himself, in proper sort, that he 
felt all which an affectionate husband ought to feel ; but 
this unnatural calmness overmastered him entirely. He 
was passive in her hands, to do or not to do whatever 
she might choose. What could she choose ? Home 
and kind home-faces there were none for her. Friends, 
except Markham, not one; and him — whatever was 
become of him — she was never to see again. He had 
not even written again to her as he had promised. 
Death had not come, though she had prayed for it. 
Madness had not come ; she was too single-minded to 
think of suicide. 

To be alone with the past was all for which she wished. 
There w^as but one gate besides the grave which she 
knew was never closed against the broken-hearted — it 
was that of the convent. She knew little and cared 
little for difference of creeds. It was not the creed of 
the Catholic which was the seed out of which those calm 
homes of sorrow have risen over the earth ; but deepest 
human feeling, deepest knowledge of the cravings of the 
suffering heart. There at least was kindness, and ten- 
derness, and compassion — there no world voice could 
break in to trouble her — there let her go. Her husband 
made no difficulty. In his heart he was not sorry, as it 
settled for him a question which might be embarrassing; 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 245 

and the few ariangements which money could command 
were soon made with a relation of one of his Italian 

friends, the Abbess of . The story was told her. 

Such stories were not new in Italy ; though it was new 
that of her own free will, a lady who had done what she 
had done, and had been bred in the free atmosphere of 
the world, should seek out so austere a home. And 
there went Helen — and there for two years she drooped, 
and then she died. All that woman's care or woman's 
affection could do to soften off her end was done. The 
exhaustion of her suffering left her soul in calm, 
and gave her back enough possession of herself to 
enable her to entangle into affection for her the gentle 
hearts which were round her and watched over her. It 
was a deep, intense affection ; deeper, perhaps, because of 
the doubt and sorrow which were blended with it. For 
Helen lived and died unreconciled with the Church. She 
loved it — she loved its austerity, its charity, the wide 
soul-absorbing spirit of devotion which penetrated and 
purified it, and the silvery loveliness of character which 
it had to bestow ; and Helen might have joined it, 
might have received from its lips on this side the 
grave the pardon which may God grant she has 
yet found beyond it : only if she could have made one 
first indispensable confession that she had sinned in her 
love for Markham Sutherland — yet, with singular persist- 
ency, she declared to the last that her sin had been in her 



246 THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 

marriage, not in her love. Unlike his, her early training 
had been too vague to weigh at all against the feeling 
which her love had given her ; she had little knowledge 
and an unpractised intellect — she had only her heart, 
which had refused to condemn her — she had never 
examined herself. The windings, wheel within wheel, of 
the untrue spirit's self-deceptions, were all strange to her, 
for she had always been too natural to think about her- 
self at all. Perhaps the heart does not deceive; never 
does give a false answer except to those double-minded 
unhappy ones who do care about themselves, and so play 
tricks with it and tamper with it. At any rate, whether 
from deadness of conscience, or from apathy, or indiffer- 
ence, or because of the unrepenting tenderness of her 
love, which never left her (although they took care to tell 
her of Markham's repentance), she still clung to her feel- 
ing for him as the best and most sacred of her 
life. She acknowledged a sin which they told her 
was none, for she felt that she ought never to have 
promised Leonard what she had; but Markham she 
loved, she must still love. Her love for him could not 
injure him. If he was happy in forgetting — in abjuring 
her, she was best pleased with what would best heal his 
sorrow. 

Strange contrast — the ends of these two ! She died 
happy, forgiven by her husband and going back to join 
her lost child, where by and by they might all meet again, 



THE NEMESIS OF FAITH. 247 

and where Markham need no longer fly from her; for 
there, there is " no marrying nor giving in marriage." It 
was a hard trial to the weeping sisters who hung around 
her departure to see with what serene tranquility the un- 
pardoned sinner, as they deemed her, could pass away to 
God. 

But Markham's new faith fabric had been reared upon 
the clouds of sudden violent feeling, and no air castle was 
ever of more unabiding growth ; doubt soon sapped it, and 
remorse, not for what he had done, but for what he had 
not done ; and amidst the wasted ruins of his life, where 
the bare bleak soil was strewed with wrecked purposes 
and shattered creeds ; with no hope to stay him, with 
no fear to raise the most dreary phantom beyond 
the grave, he sunk down into the barren waste, and 
the dry sands rolled over him where he lay; and no 
living being was left behind him upon earth, who would 
not mourn over the day which brought life to Markham 
Sutherland. 



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